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INTRODUCTION • 13

 precisely insofar as the development in Husserl’s account of meaning reveals

that the notion of meaning or sense properly arises only in a reflection on thatcorrelation. In other words, we straightforwardly experience objects in their 

significance for us. In our straightforward e xperience the focus is on the

object of experience with its significant properties and attributes. But we can

adjust the manner in which we attend to the object, and when we do so we

focus our attention not on the object as such but on its significance. This is not

turning our attention to some different entity called a “sense” or “meaning”;

it is simply refocusing our attention from the significant object  to the

 significance of the object for us. This turning of attention is precisely what

Husserl has thematized as the methodological device of the phenomenologicalreduction. The methodological point picks out what the substantive analyses

of meaning reveal as a way of proceeding, that is, that we need to focus our 

attention on both the subjective and o bjective conditions of mea ning by

focusing not on actual subjects and objects, but on the essential features of the

correlation between the noetic and noematic dimensions of our experiences.

To turn our attention to this correlation is to perform the phenomenological

reduction.

The revision of the theory of intentionality and the related disclosure of the

methodological principle of the phenomenological reduction are two of the

three major developments in Husserl’s thought during the Göttingen years.

The third is the development of his views on the nature of the consciousness

of inner time, a development that leads to the disclosu re o f what he ca lls

“absolute consciousness.” The problem motivating these reflections is one of 

intentionality: how are we aware of tempor al objects, specifically the

temporal objects, that is, the experiences, that belong to the flow of experi-

ence itself. When speaking of immanent temporal objects in this co ntext,

Husserl has in mind not only the perceivings, rememberings, and so forth thatare the experiences, but also the “real” (reell) contents tha t belong to them,

such as sensation-contents.

To state the problem more specifically, a phenomenological description

of the subjective conditions of experience must account not merely for the

successio n of consciousness but the consciousness of succession . This is

impossible if we conceive experience as a succession of atomistic, temporal

moments. Instead, we must recognize that consciousness at any given moment

is aware of an experience that has temporal extension, that begins in the past,

endures in the present, and is aimed at the future. To account for this sense of consciousness, Husserl distinguishes two “levels” in consciousness: the non-

temporal absolute consciousness which makes possible the awareness of inner 

time by virtue of a compound intentionality directed at once to the “now,” the

“just elapsed,” and the “yet to come”; and the flow of temporally ordered

exper iences themselves. In this way, Husserl accounts for the momentary