Hegel’s Noesis as Embodied and Extended Mind

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Anthony F. Crisafi, Valencia College

Introduction

Hegel’s dialectical movement from the subjective to the objective in his Phenomenology of Spirit is one of the first real attempts in western thought to articulate a theory of embodied and extended mind. Whereas before Hegel Descartes would situate a problem between the mind and the body and whereas Kant would categorize that the world of the mind was divided between the noumenal and the phenomenal, Hegel attempted to reconcile these problems by proposing that the mind must make itself manifest and concrete in order to have any power or influence. Hegel imagined embodiment taking the form of social institutions, such as government, religious, or educational, and in the form of certain kinds of discourse and texts, such as religion, art, and philosophy. The most important concept we gained from Hegel is that questions of metaphysics must be examined in connection with their relationship to objective consciousness, as these questions themselves only made sense if they were being objectified in some real and physical manner. Making the mind embodied either in institutions and texts, or through technology, is a fundamental concept throughout Hegel’s works, particularly in the Phenomenology of Spirit, the Science of Logic, and the Philosophy of Right, as well as in others. For Hegel, the concrete and the objective represent the absolute consciousness at work in our world.

However, it is clear from the research that Hegel has been either ignored or forgotten when it comes to issues dealing with mind, consciousness, and cognition, and more particularly in the fields of phenomenology and cognitive science. In the growing field of embodiment discourse, there are very few articles or books that deal with Hegel and embodiment. One reason may be that critics and theorists may view Hegel’s dialectic as not pertaining to the body specifically. One book that tries to clarify this problem, John Russon’s The Self and Its Body in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, offers a view of Hegel and embodiment as a psychological discussion of Hegel’s concept of Geist. Hegel’s concept of embodiment remains, according to Russon, an explication of numerous levels of expression, socialization, and habituation. Russon understands Hegel here as the inheritor of the Aristotelian teleology, and Hegel’s concept of embodiment parallels Aristotle’s in abiding by an internal principle of self-explication, in which personal identity requires and is defined by self-expression. However, most other articles that deal with Hegel and embodiment tend to focus on Hegel’s relationship to idealism than to pure concepts of embodiment, such as Paul Redding’s article “Embodiment, Conceptuality and Intersubjectivity in Idealist and Pragmatist Approaches to Judgment.” That Hegel is so ignored in this field makes me question just how critics and theorists who work in embodiment situate Hegel in the first place.

Setting aside the issues of critical exegesis of Hegel for the moment, it is my thesis here that Hegel is important and pertinent to the discussion of mind as it is unfolding in the fields of phenomenology and cognitive science. I will argue that the Hegelian dialectic is in fact a vital key to understanding current theories of embodied and extended mind. The general field of contemporary phenomenology is alive with Hegel, not because he has become fashionable, but that different discourse areas in which phenomenology runs through are also looking seriously at Hegel. This can be demonstrated at the amount of work currently appearing in a plethora of areas that intersect and interconnect with each other in these fields. For example, in the research writings of Axel Honneth, Shaun Gallagher, and Peter Sloterdijk, Hegel has become important for making the relationship between the human being and the physical world possible. Honneth recognizes in Hegel the concept of intersubjectivity, what Hegel himself referred to as interrelatedness; Gallagher, whose own contributions to phenomenology and cognitive science, specifically in embodied and extended cognition, have led him to explore Hegel in these areas from a pragmatist view, arguing for a more central positioning of Hegel as what may link together variegated approaches both to theoretical and to practical problems within phenomenology and cognitive science; and for Sloterdijk Hegel is crucial for humanizing the often coldness of purely cynical pseudo-scientific technologies in favor of a deeper and warmer discussion of the creative side of consciousness and how it maintains and sustains our existence.

Phenomenology, therefore, through its various discourses, is becoming more and more dependent on Hegel for describing much more substantive relations and connections between subjective and objective consciousness. Cognitive science is beginning to look seriously at Hegel in connection with concepts as they relate to consciousness and cognition through embodiment and extension. I will demonstrate Hegel’s influence in all of these areas in this dissertation by focusing on a specific concept within Hegel’s philosophy that resonates throughout all of the areas I have mentioned so far. It is Hegel’s concept of intelligent consciousness that connects all these threads together, and Hegel understood and defined this intelligent consciousness as noesis. Therefore, the purpose of this analysis is to demonstrate how the cognitive aspects of Hegel’s dialectic can be applied to current research methods within phenomenology and cognitive science, specifically how Hegel’s dialectic applies to the concepts of embodied and extended cognition. Phenomenology and cognitive science represent a unique and interdisciplinary approach to the study of mind, one in which research methodologies of philosophy and psychology are united under the humanistic past they both share. They are both respective discourses of the human sciences: phenomenology, as an extension of philosophy, is the study of the human experience with consciousness, specifically how cognition interacts with the physical in order to become representation through the creation of artifacts, whether verbal, textual, or cultural; and cognitive science, as an extension of psychology, is the study of the bio-physical construction of cognition as an organic system grounded in the body. I am not interested in tracing this complex history any further at this point; it may be important to do so in the future, but my main point here is that the recognition of Hegel as contributing to the study of human cognition has been neglected by these discourses. There may be good reasons for this, and we may need to discuss these further, but for now I want to focus on how Hegel applies specifically to the area of embodied and extended mind. This is where I see Hegel as being integral, as his dialectic represents the first articulation of what is now known as extended and embodied cognition in western humanistic tradition.

Classical and Hegelian Construction of Noesis

Noesis was specifically understood by the Ancient Greek philosophers as the operation of nous, or thinking as opposed to sensation, and intuition as opposed to discursive reasoning. There are subtle differences between the mere perception of an object or objects, as understood by the term aesthesis and other kinds of psychic awareness that goes beyond the sense data and perceives less tangible things, like resemblances and differences between objects, is already present in Homer and is identified with the organ called nous, or mind. Central to the history of philosophy are three overarching problems: the problem of knowledge, the problem of conduct, and the problem of governance. Beginning in mimesis, or the mirror, in dance and ritual that encoded and explained the world, the questions become more insistent, and as a whole, communities begin to ponder the nature of things. The dance is augmented by song and poetry, by epic tales so vivid that children never forget the main characters and their extraordinary experiences and exploits, and which pose in different terms the fundamental questions: (1) What is the world? (2) What should I do? and (3) How are out lives to be ordered?

Homer’s epics are rich in what may be called pre-philosophical reflections on the human condition and the very point and purpose of life. Such works are the background “folk” wisdom of an age; philosophy is a refinement or rejection of the claims of the dancer and the bard. The three basic philosophical questions—What can I know? How should I behave? Is this tribe or polis able to preserve our knowledge and protect our interests?—were addressed before the beginnings of history. The beliefs of preliterate societies are stored and rehearsed in the form of dance and painting, song and poetry, all incorporated into and deriving from myth.

Hegel discovered noesis through his studies of Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus. From Plato, Hegel learned that “divine intelligence” is a creative force, one which manifests itself in the dialectic between mind and reality. The image of the birth of Athena that Plato uses to depict the “he theon noesis” appears also in Hegel as the prime and supreme example of creative intelligence. For Plato, noesis represented the highest form of intelligence, in which only the gods or the most prized of philosophical minds could engage. Plato demonstrates this in his Republic, where noesis resides in the upper level of Plato’s “theory of the line” as the ultimate form of intelligence. What is appropriate to note about Plato’s noesis is that it is the highest level of intellection—the ability to create new ideas out from the struggle between life and death. The Birth of Athena, which Plato identifies in his Cratylus, exemplifies this for Plato. Hegel, however, views Plato’s noesis similarly, but without mythologizing the intellectual process. For Hegel, Plato’s noesis forms the basis for the Hegelian dialectical struggle of the mind coming to grips with an atavistic reality, one which much be overcome by mind (Geist) in order to ensure the existence of the human. In other words, for Hegel, the image of Metis struggling to ensure her own survival against Zeus’ destruction by creating her progeny Athena is tantamount to the human overcoming the physical world in order ensure its own existence. What Hegel takes from Plato here in terms of noesis is that human intellection is a creative and destructive process—a dialectic of life through cognition engaged by consciousness. In the Republic, Plato not only attempts to establish a universal understanding of justice, but he also developed an explanation of reality and our knowledge of it. This explanation lead Plato to postulate the Theory of Forms. In order to explain the theory of reality, Plato used the “Theory of the Divided Line” and the “Allegory of the Cave” in the Republic. In these, Plato distinguished four distinct levels of reality and their corresponding levels of knowing. The length of each segment of the divided line represents the degree of clarity, certainty, and truth of that particular level. This system can be represented in the following table:

Plato has a new spiritualized conception of soul that, though originally posited on religious grounds, is incorporated in his theory of knowledge. It is this pure unitary soul of the Phaedo that becomes the epistemological correlative of the eide and, being absolutely different in kind from the body, can perform all the cognitive activities that Pre-Socratic philosophers associated with nous but were unable to explain on the level of substance. But the problem is considerably more complex than this. Even in the Phaedo the soul is the arche of all cognitive activity; sensation is perception by the soul through the body, and phronesis (wisdom) is an operation of the soul alone. In the Phaedo the distinction between the two operations is largely in terms of the objects known; in the Politaea it reappears in a much more complex form based on the internal operations of the soul. This latter is now divided into three parts, and the upper part, the logistikon, is responsible for noetic activity. But the psychology is far more sophisticated here, and in the “Theory of the Divided Line” (above), from the Republic VI, noetic activity is explained in some detail. The distinction drawn between episteme and doxa is maintained here, but Plato discovers that there is more than one type of episteme. The upper part of the line that represented knowledge of the noeta (Rep. 509e) is further subdivided into what Plato calls noesis and dianoia. These two operations of the logistikon have been debated by both Aristotle and Plotinus. Aristotle tends to view the dianoia as that activity of the mind which has as its object the mathematical, while the objects of noesis are the eide. Aristotle also notes that dianoia is discursive reasoning in general and noesis is the immediate intellectual intuition (Anal. Post. II, 100b). Plotinus will distinguish between logismos and nous. What is clear, however, is that the method of noesis is that known to Plato as dialektike, and the way of life based upon it is philosophia.

There are certain passages in Plato that give somewhat more of a purely psychological insight into the workings of the intellective process. Plato seeks to derive episteme from the Greek word to “stand” or “come to a halt” (ephistamai) and so explain intellection as a “coming to a halt” in the midst of a series of sense impressions, the “fixing” of an intuitive concept (Cratylus 437a, Phaedo 96b). But this psychological approached is overwhelmed by a flood of physical considerations. Noesis is an activity and as such must be located within the general categories of change and kinesis. Plato speaks of revolutions of the body of the kosmos that reveal the motion of its own soul and provide a visible moral paradigm for the motions of our own soul.

For example, in the Timaeus Plato presents an elaborately wrought account of the formation of the universe. Plato is deeply impressed with the order and beauty he observes in the universe, and his project in the dialogue is to explain that order and beauty. The universe, he proposes, is the product of rational, purposive, and beneficent agency. It is the handiwork of a divine Craftsman (“Demiurge,” dêmiourgos, 28a6), who, imitating an unchanging and eternal model, imposes mathematical order on a preexistent chaos to generate the ordered universe (kosmos). The governing explanatory principle of the account is teleological: the universe as a whole as well as its various parts are so arranged as to produce a vast array of good effects. It strikes Plato strongly that this arrangement is not fortuitous, but the outcome of the deliberate intent of Intellect (nous), anthropomorphically represented by the figure of the Craftsman who plans and constructs a world that is as excellent as its nature permits it to be. As Plato tells it, the beautiful orderliness of the universe is not only the manifestation of Intellect; it is also the model for rational souls to understand and to emulate. Such understanding and emulation restores those souls to their original state of excellence, a state that was lost in their embodiment. There is, then, an explicit ethical and religious dimension to the discourse.

But it is in the Cratylus that Plato offers the most important analysis of noesis. Plato writes:

The ancients seem to have had the same belief about Athena as the interpreters of Homer have now; for most of these, in commenting on the poet, say that he represents Athena as mind (nous) and intellect (dianoia); and the maker of names seems to have had a similar conception of her, and indeed he gives her the still higher title of “divine intelligence” (hê theou noêsis), seeming to say: This is she who has the mind of God (Theonoa). (Cratylus 407a-b)

Plato’s eerily deconstructive reading of Homer’s rendition of the myth of Athena’s birth here from the Cratylus reminds us not that language is ineffable and ephemeral, but that within the dialectical synthesis between attempts to define and create meaning for and from a word or term, the moment that definition becomes possible itself demonstrates the hê theou noêsis, the “divine intelligence.” Athena herself is the noêsis, the intelligence, the ability to bring together disparate organon in order to sustain life through wisdom. Plato here reminds us that noêsis makes Athena from Theonoa, which in this case should be understood as the feminine gynecological struggle to create life against the patriarchal destroyer, Zeus, Athena’s Father and the killer of her mother Metis. The Greek poet Hesiod tells the tale about the birth of Athena:

And she remained hidden beneath the inward parts of Zeus, even Metis, Athena’s mother, worker of righteousness, who was wiser than gods and mortal men. There the goddess received that whereby she excelled in strength all the deathless ones who dwell in Olympus, she who made the host-scaring weapon of Athena. And with it gave her birth, arrayed in arms of war. (Theogony 929a-929t)

Zeus and Metis, daughter of the Titan Oceanus, were the parents of Athena. But Gaea had warned Zeus that, after giving birth to the girl with whom she was pregnant, Metis would bear a son destined to rule heaven. To avoid losing his throne to a son, Zeus swallowed Metis, just as Cronus had previously swallowed his own children to thwart succession. Metis’s child Athena was born from the head of Zeus, which Hephaestus split open with an axe. Consciousness stands atop the head like a triumphant spirit set free, completely formed from within the mind first before being birthed into the world, conquering the limitations of the materiality of its quickening within the brain, and emerging as a dancing thought whose strength and precision buoys it above and beyond even the most powerful of forces. The birth of Consciousness into the world is the most painful of mental processes, as the organon necessary to create and produce it requires a concentration of multiple faculties, some of which include deeply self-reflecting phenomenologies of cognitive moments of existence so subtle as to originate from within the very nervous system itself.

Hesiod shows how Metis (Thought) is consumed by Zeus, and how from that initial consumption she becomes the quickening agent for the daughter Athena, goddess of wisdom and strength. Zeus’ anger at being cheated by Hera, as she bore Hephaestus to spite Zeus for his infidelities, and his fear of the strength of unknown creative and reproductive beauty of Thought compulsively leads him to sexually conquer and then consume Metis in an attempt to rid himself of the painful memories of his own insecurities. In the mythologies, Zeus is fated to be dethroned as he dethroned his father before him, Kronos, who also dethroned his own Father Ouranos. However, Metis, whose very name means “wisdom, skill, or craft,” would use the very last bit of her abilities not to sustain herself but to create a new living entity who would be the strongest force for human life. Plato writes in his Symposium that:

If Apollo invented archery and medicine and divination, it was under the guidance of Desire and Love; so that he too may be deemed a disciple of Love as likewise may the Muses in music, Hephaestus in metal-work, Athena in weaving and Zeus “in pilotage of Gods and men.” (Symposium 197b)

Here in his list of accomplishments the guidance of Desire and Love creates, Plato relates that Athena’s creation is weaving, the ability to bring threads of different colors to create beautiful art, examples of Athena as noêsis, synthesizer of organic structures which can be used to create meaning. The image of Athena’s birth becomes for Hegel the central metaphor for how the human is born from consciousness instead of merely the bio-organic nature of reproduction. In Hegel’s famous parable of the flower in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, we can directly see the correlation of the flower (which equals the human being born into the world) as the image of Athena being born out of Zeus’ head:

The bud disappears in the budding-forth of the blossom, and one might say that the former is refuted by the latter; similarly, when the fruit appears, the blossom is shown up in its turn as a false manifestation of the plant, and the fruit now emerges as the truth instead. These forms are not just distinguished from one another, they also supplant one another as mutually incompatible. Yet, at the same time their fluid nature makes them moments of an organic unity in which they not only do not conflict, but in which each is as necessary as the other; and mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole. (22)

Just as the fruit is the actuality of the plant, the idea exists as a pure form that is born into physical reality, just as Athena. The parable of the flower is probably one of the best examples of how mind works through stages of the dialectic to become an extended and embodied organic unity; because ideas themselves are conscious creations, they must necessarily give themselves over to the higher rational function of the social reality in order to see any growth or development at all.

Of birth and of noesis, Hegel also writes in the Phenomenology:

The ‘I’, or becoming in general, this mediation, on account of its simple nature, is just immediacy in the process of becoming, and is the immediate itself. Reason, is, therefore, misunderstood when reflection is excluded from the True, and is not grasped as a positive moment of the Absolute. It is reflection that takes the True a result, but it is equally reflection that overcomes the antithesis between the process of its becoming and the result, for this becoming is also simple, and therefore not different from the form of the True which shows itself as simple in its result; the process of becoming is rather just this return into simplicity. Though the embryo is indeed in itself a human being, it is not so for itself; that it only is as cultivated Reason, which has made itself into what it is in itself. (12)

Here the concept of birth is here linked to the essential quality of noesis in that the human being possess the immediacy of rational intellect in so far that in the embryonic state the human is an existent in- itself. For it to become a purely rational being, it must engage in deliberative noesis, or what Hegel expresses as “Reason is purposive activity” (12). It is only through the exercise of noesis that the human actualizes its reason and becomes conscious, self-conscious, and then intelligent.

The image of Athena as the epitome of noesis is also evoked by Hegel in the Philosophy of Nature—the second volume of the Encyclopedia of the Sciences. Here, Athena becomes the pure embodiment of rational intelligence born by the noetic mind into the natural world itself. Hegel writes:

There is essentially Understanding in Nature. Nature’s formations are determinate, bounded, and enter as such into existence. So that even if the earth was once in a state where it had no living things but only the chemical process, and so on, yet the moment the lightning of life strikes into matter, at once there is present a determinate, complete creature, as Athena fully armed springs forth from the head of Zeus. . . . Man has not developed himself out of the animal, nor the animal out of the plant; each- is at a single stroke what it is. In this individual, evolutionary changes do occur: at birth it is not yet complete, but is already the real possibility of all it is to become. The living thing is the point, this particular soul (Seele), subjectivity, infinite form, and thus immediately determined in and for itself. Already in the crystal, as a point, the entire shape is at once present, the totality of the form; the crystal’s capacity for growth is only a quantitative alteration. Still more is this the case in the living thing. (284)

From here we can readily see that the Platonic image of Athena as the hê theou noêsis, or the “divine intelligence,” is what drives the human to create, maintain, and sustain its existential space within nature predicated on engaging the active intelligence. Plato’s Athena then becomes for Hegel the supreme creator, as she is the truest and purest form of intelligence.

From Aristotle Hegel learned that noesis is the intellection of the mind (nous)—an intellection purely grounded in human capability. For Plato, noesis represented the formal intellection of the divine, and as such was not attainable to human consciousness, except by the philosophical few. For Aristotle, however, noesis is the creative act of human mind sui generis, in that noesis is what the human mind is both capable of and for which it has been created for. This is what Hegel discovers about noesis in Aristotle’s image of the noesis noesos, the Prime Mover who “thinks itself into thinking.” For Aristotle, the Prime Mover creates itself by thinking itself into existence. However, here we find in Aristotle the same division between soul-body as we find in Plato; Aristotle admits that humans can divinely intelligize, but he still keeps this intelligizing within the realm of a mythology. Instead of being merely the caprice of the gods, as Plato does, Aristotle insists that this intelligizing comes to the human from outside of itself—it is given to us by the Prime Mover. The distinction, at first, does not seem much different from Plato, as both Plato and Aristotle suggest that noesis—the act of intelligence—is something for which is outside the complete grasp of the human. But for Plato, the human can only glimpse at this divine intelligence, while in Aristotle’s typology the human can engage with this intelligence, but only by first enactively engaging with intelligence, thereby keeping this divine intelligence within the realm of the Prime Mover, and hence, with the realm of the divine. This, of course, is in line with Aristotle’s teleology, but remains a mystery as far as how the human itself develops intelligence.

There are significant problems with what Aristotle proposes, especially by way of his typology between the body and the soul. Aristotle keeps these separate and does not consistently explain how the soul (mind, nous), as entangled with the body, can engage intellectually. Aristotle tries to explain intellectual abilities—such as love, hate, memory, and discursive thinking—as attributes not as a pure intelligence but as a composite between intelligence, body, and soul. For example, in De Anima (On the Soul), Aristotle argues that desires as such are not part of intelligence (noesis) but are produced by the body—they are fantasies of the body. Here, again, as with Plato, Aristotle presupposes a double intelligence—a higher intelligence and a lower intelligence, in which the higher intelligence is an active intelligence and the lower a passive intelligence. It is this lower intelligence that is changeable and possesses the desires. Memory is also considered by Aristotle to be a component of the lower intelligence, since memory is a part of the physical fantasy of the body. The higher intelligence is considered active, in that it is noesis pure and proper. However, this active intelligence is not an individualized intelligence, meaning that it is not found within any one example of the human being. Therefore, Aristotle creates a dualistic problem in defining noesis as intelligence both as and as not a part of the human body. For example, for Aristotle, active intelligence does not memorize, but somehow is the true practice of the human. This creates a dichotomous problem in Aristotle’s psychology, in which the soul is the entelechy of the body and intelligence is the entelechy of the soul from outside of the body.

Aristotle’s treatment of noesis, like his explanation of aesthesis, is conducted within the categories of potency (dynamis) and action (energeia). The nous before it knows is actually nothing but potentially all the things it can know; the eide are present in it but only potentially, as Aristotle claims in De Anima, (III, 429a). When the nous begins to operate it passes from a passive to an activated state by reason of its becoming identical with its object, the intelligible form. There is in noesis a parallel with aesthesis: just as aesthesis extracts the sensible forms of sensible objects, so noesis thinks the intelligible forms in sensible images (phantasiai), and noesis never occurs without these latter. Noesis can be directly of essences or it can operate through judgments (hypolepseis), or by the combination (synthesis) or separation (diairesis) of concepts, and it is only in this latter operation that error is possible.

Hegel, however, is neither a strict Aristotelian nor a strict Platonist when it comes to the relationship between the soul and the body. Hegel seeks to reconcile this dichotomy, and as such noesis for Hegel is a pure construct of human consciousness, one in which the consciousness mind actively engages with the body in order to situate and extend itself into existential space. For this typology of noesis to work, however, Hegel had to turn to another source in order to find the reconciliation between Plato and Aristotle. As Hegel sought to overcome the mind-body (soul-body) problem that was still prevalent within philosophy of his day, as evidenced by the Cartesian mind-body dualism and the Kantian dualism between the noumenal-phenomenal, Hegel has first to define noesis for himself as first a theory of embodied consciousness. Hegel would make noesis the central logic of his dialectic, a logic which is first and foremost a synthesizing of the mind and the body, and for this he would find in another ancient philosopher who the imagined the intellect as ensouled within the body. That philosopher was Plotinus.

Plato’s successor, Plotinus, Born in Greek-speaking Egypt studied in Alexandria, center of Hellenistic learning. After unsuccessful attempt to visit Persia and study philosophy there, established himself as philosophical teacher in Rome. Plotinus became foremost advocate of Plato’s thought in ancient world, and his interpretation forms the basis of revived Platonism known as “neo-Platonism.” Plotinus was enormously influential on early Christian thought. Plotinus asserts that humans, as eternal souls in temporary bodies, come into contact with crude matter and forget their origins in “the One” (an entity unknowable through ordinary reason, completely self-sufficient, totally transcendent, and the source of all things). Through cultivation of virtue, philosophical training, and spiritual contemplation, the soul may regain its lost unity with the One. Often considered the founder of “Neoplatonism,” Plotinus regarded himself as a Platonist, as a defender and expositor of the position of Plato. But, according to Plotinus, Plato needs to be interpreted, and the central Platonic works bearing on our reading of Plotinus are the Timaeus and Republic. Plotinus developed a theory that consisted of Three Hypostases. Hypostasis means something that stands under and supports, or is the underlying or essential part of a thing. A hypostasis is not a cause in the sense of preceding temporally. The Three Hypostases of Plotinus include: The One (or The Good), Intellect, and Soul. For Plotinus, the beauty of art and nature is a manifestation of the unity of being. Plotinus ascends from the unity of individual souls to the unity of the general or world soul, and from that to the intellect thinking itself. Ultimately all dualities of knowing and known, subject and object, are overcome by the self- identity of the self-reflective thought. It is to this wholeness that all orders of creation aspire, and from it that all have been created.

Clearly this concerns more than analysis of composition. Beauty then could be seen to achieve at least two things: (1) to understand or perceive the world in a new and enriched way or (2) to move us outside ourselves. That concept can lead us in two directions: (1) the relationship between the beautiful and the good—the path of architectural determinism or (2) the relationship between the beautiful and the sacred—the discussion of sacred places.

For Plotinus, then, noesis is the active mind, embodied and entellected. Plotinus’ doctrine of “the One”—in which he seeks to eliminate the duality between mind-body (soul-body) is both Platonic and Aristotelian, in that both Plato and Aristotle’s images of the “thinking thinker” represents a duality between subject and object. According to Plotinus, any thought about intelligence (noesis) must be a thought about something, and this thinking about something involves a duality that remains true even of intuitive self-thinking intellect (nous). Plotinus seeks to establish that the first principle must be beyond all determination or limitation, and as such, it must be free from even the minimum duality implied in this kind of self-reflective thinking. This leads Plotinus to posit “the One” as being beyond even the conception of a limitation—in other words, it could not be a “Being” as such, as a “Being” for Plotinus is always limited by form or essence. An absolute formless being is impossible, and therefore absolute being is the unified whole of all form which is the divine intelligence (the he theon noesis that Plato himself describes). Therefore, that which is beyond the limitation of form is beyond being, for Plotinus.

Plotinus here is attempting to lift the mind (nous) beyond limitation and claims this is the “Good” in the Platonic sense. Plotinus reminds us that the undetermined, unlimited first principle is not a mere negation, but something supremely positive, so positive that it is both the cause of the existence of the whole universe and the goal to which all living beings aspire. The universe for Plotinus is conceived entirely in the classical Hellenic sense—of both Plato and Aristotle—up to the level of the divine intellect (noesis) in that up to this level the more formed and definite a thing is, the better and more real it is. The being and existence of the world of the intellect—the Forms—are definite in character and finite in number, and they are the best of and the only real beings.

There is here in Plotinus a synthesis between Form and Being. For Plotinus, beyond intellect lies the total indetermination of “the One” or “the Good,” which is the source of a certain indeterminate vitality underlying the formal and definite world of intellect (noesis) itself. But as Plotinus associates being with form, limit, and determination, “the One” emerges as pure and absolute being, and as such it is the first existential intellect (noesis). The whole purpose of the critical purification of our minds by negation which Plotinus requires of us, if we are to pass beyond intellect to the first principle of reality, is to reveal to us the eternal source of being, intellect, good, and unity as we discover these at their highest form, which for Plotinus is more than they are because at their source they are themselves free from limitation. It is an essential part of this process of purification of our minds by negation that what is denied of “the One” should be thoroughly eliminated.

It is in this light that Hegel himself both interprets and incorporates Plotinus’ own concept of noesis into his philosophy. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel writes that “Plotinus thus distinguishes in νοΰς thinking (νοΰς), the object thought of (νοητόν), and thought (νόησις), so that νοΰς is one, and at the same time all; but thought [νόησις] is the unity of what had been distinguished” (Vol. 2, 421). Here Hegel recognizes in Plotinus that thought (νόησις) is synthesis; it is the mediating term that Hegel himself writes about throughout his works, the mediating term that brings together the individual and the universal through the particular. It is the mediation of subjective spirit through objective spirit into absolute spirit. But, more importantly, for Hegel this mediation is accomplished through the body. As he writes in the Phenomenology:

The individual exists in and for himself: he is for himself or is a free activity; but he has an original determinate being of his own—a determinateness which is in principle the same as what psychology thought to find outside of him. In his own self, therefore, there emerges the antithesis, this duality of being the movement of consciousness, and the fixed being of an appearing actuality, an actuality which in the individual is immediately his own. This being, the body of the specific individuality, is the latter’s original aspect, that aspect in the making of which it has not itself played a part. But since the individual is at the same time only what he has done, his body is also the expression of himself which he has himself produced; it is at the same time a sign, which has not remained an immediate fact, but something through which the individual only makes known what he really is, when he sets his original nature to work. (185- 186)

Here Hegel makes the body the seat of both the immediate nature of the mind and the mediating factor of consciousness itself. The body as immediate is finite in its existence but also infinite in its ability to engage in noesis. This mediation of the body is clearly in line with Hegel’s analysis of Plotinus above and the following passage from the Lectures:

. . . Plotinus makes the first world-soul to be immediate activity of the finite understanding, which is an object to itself; it is pure soul above the sublunar region, and dwells in the upper heaven of the fixed stars. This world-soul has power to originate; from it again there flows an entirely sensuous soul. The desire of the individual and particular soul separated from the whole gives it a body; this it receives in the higher regions of the heavens. With this body it obtains fancy and memory. At last it repairs to the soul of the sensible world; and from this it acquires sensation, desires, and the life that is vegetative in nature. (Vol. 2, 430)

Noesis, then, is the mark of the creative intelligence that is capable of creating itself in both its world soul and its sensuous soul. In both of these passages, we can clearly see Hegel invoking both the concept of noesis as higher intelligence and as physical manifestation. For Hegel, noesis represents the mediation of Geist mind, soul, and spirit at once through the very immediate existence of the human and its body. For Hegel, the very physicality of the body represents more than something to be overcome; in his analysis of Plotinus, Hegel recognizes the absolute existence of the body as the seat of pure noetic creation.

Problems with Husserl’s Typology of Noesis and the Hegelian Solution

Husserl’s Logical Investigations was inspired by Bolzano’s ideal of logic, while taking up Brentano’s conception of descriptive psychology. In his Theory of Science (1835) Bolzano distinguished between subjective and objective ideas or representations (Vorstellungen). In effect Bolzano criticized Kant and before him the classical empiricists and rationalists for failing to make this sort of distinction, thereby rendering phenomena merely subjective. Logic studies objective ideas, including propositions, which in turn make up objective theories as in the sciences. Psychology would, by contrast, study subjective ideas, the concrete contents (occurrences) of mental activities in particular minds at a given time.

Husserl was after both, within a single discipline. So phenomena must be reconceived as objective intentional contents (sometimes called intentional objects) of subjective acts of consciousness. Phenomenology would then study this complex of consciousness and correlated phenomena. In Ideas I (Book One, 1913) Husserl introduced two Greek words to capture his version of the Bolzanoan distinction: noesis and noema, from the Greek verb noéō (νοέω), meaning to perceive, think, intend, whence the noun nous or mind). The intentional process of consciousness is called noesis, while its ideal content is called noema. The noema of an act of consciousness Husserl characterized both as an ideal meaning and as “the object as intended.” Thus the phenomenon, or object-as-it-appears, becomes the noema, or object-as-it-is-intended. The interpretations of Husserl’s theory of noema have been several and amount to different developments of Husserl’s basic theory of intentionality.

One change between the Logical Investigations and the Ideas is that Husserl began using the term ‘noesis’ to refer to intentional acts or “act-quality” and ‘noema’ (plural ‘noemata’) to refer to what, in the Logical Investigations had been referred to as “act-matter.” Husserl does not simply change his terminology, however. This change in terminology coincides with an apparent change in metaphysical understanding of the relationship between the noema as an ideal meaning and the particular mental activities of actual subjects, and also with a much more intense interest in analyzing the different elements of the noema, as well as understanding its relationships, both temporal and semantic, to other noemata.

Metaphysically the main change is that Husserl seems to abandon the model of meanings as ideal species that get instantiated in the act-matters of particular subjects in favor of a more direct correlative relationship between the noesis (intentional acts) and the noemata (their objects). In Ideas it is noemata themselves that are the objects of intentional thought, that are graspable and repeatable and that, according to Husserl, are not parts of the intentional acts of conscious subjects. It is a point of interpretative and philosophical contention whether the noema, as Husserl understood it, is better viewed as a sort of abstract Fregean sense that mediates between the subjective noetic acts of individual thinkers and the objective referents of their thoughts (Føllesdal 1982, Smith and McIntyre 1982), or whether the noema is better seen as the object of intentional thought itself as viewed from a particular perspective (Drummond 1990). While the difference between these two interpretations may seem rather small, they are actually quite different in terms of their metaphysical commitments and in terms of the particular issues of meaning, reference, and epistemology that they are able to resolve or be challenged by. For a general introduction and overview see the introduction to Smith and Smith (1995) and for more detailed discussion of some of the main differences see Dreyfus and Hall (1982), Zahavi (1994), and Drummond (2003).

There arises a significant problem with the typology of noesis and noema as Husserl constructed these terms for his phenomenology, especially in light of the details concerning the classical construction of noesis as I have outlined it above. Noesis was an already established concept within ancient Greek philosophy, one in which the following diagram demonstrates:

In the original Greek concept, noesis is the power of the mind (nous) which arranges, creates, maintains, and sustains the noema. The term noema in Greek does not stand for the empirical object of noesis; rather, noema is the plural form for the stuff of the mind itself, the noetic and the noematic. For Husserl, however, it was important to maintain the dualistic problem of the mind in relation with the outside world, one in which he both inherited and embraced through his investigations into both Descartes and Kant. For Husserl, the noema was the object of noesis, meaning that through the epoche, the phenomenological reduction of the noema, one then extracts the noesis as a pure, abstract category of thought. This can be seen in the following diagram:

However, this is misunderstanding on Husserl’s part; because in the Greek construction of noesis, as well as Hegel’s own construction of noesis, noesis is the dynamic intelligence that not only understands noema but actually creates noema. For Husserl, noesis is the pure meaning that is left after the epoche reduces the noema; noesis becomes the abstract ideal and not as created noema. For example, in the Ideas,

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