INTRODUCTION

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precisely insofar as the development in Husserls account of meaning reveals that the notion of meaning or sense properly arises only in a reflection on that correlation. In other words, we straightforwardly experience objects in their significance for us. In our straightforward experience 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 simp ly 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 phenomenological reduction. 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 objective conditions of meaning 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 Husserls thought during the Gttingen years. The third is the development of his views on the nature of the consciousness of inner time, a development that leads to the disclosure of what he calls absolute consciousness. The problem motivating these reflections is one of intentionality: how are we aware of tem poral ob jects, specifically the temporal objects, that is, the experiences, that belong to the flow of experience itself. W hen speaking of immanent temporal objects in this context, Husserl has in mind not only the perceivings, rememberings, and so forth that are the experiences, but also the real (reell) contents that 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 succession of consciousness but the consciousness of succession. T his 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 nontemporal 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 experiences themselves. In this way, Husserl accounts for the momentary