noème

Noème is a term originating from the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. It refers to the "what" of an experience, the meaningful content of consciousness, as opposed to the "how" or the act of experiencing itself, which is called the noesis. For example, if you are looking at a red apple, the noèse is the act of seeing, perceiving, and thinking about the apple. The noème, in contrast, is the apple as it is intended by consciousness, the objective correlate of the act of perception. It is the meaning that is apprehended.

Husserl distinguished between the noème and the object as it exists in the world independently of our consciousness. The noème is not the physical apple itself but rather the apple as it appears to us, imbued with meaning and properties. It is the invariant structure or essence of the intended object that remains constant across different acts of consciousness, even if the subjective experience of it varies. For instance, the noème of an apple would include its redness, roundness, and perhaps its taste, as these are all aspects apprehended in our experience of it.

The concept of the noème is central to Husserl's phenomenological method, which aims to describe consciousness and its intentional objects without making assumptions about their existence in the external world. By bracketing or suspending belief in the objective reality of things, phenomenology seeks to reveal the essential structures of experience, and the noème is a key component of this structure, representing the meaningful content that consciousness grasters.