Now that most of Husserl’s writings are accessible in print, it is incumbent on us Husserl scholars to take a complete look at his thinking about intentionality. This is even more needed because most writers on Husserl, including this author, have restricted themselves to some phase or phases of his thinking about intentionality. It is only after we have gained a total picture of the theory that we can evaluate it. It is this writer’s conviction that the theory, in its principal components, is pretty well sustainable, and defensible against his critics.
The Formal Theory of Intentional Acts
In this part of the theory, the acts, per definition, are considered as satisfying the Brentano thesis, and the sentences containing the main verb, which stand for such acts, as satisfying the Chisholm criteria. Such analytic philosophers as Chisholm, who accept the Brentano thesis, make one major mistake, and we must here warn against it: they misread the Brentano thesis as giving a way of distinguishing the mental from the physical (including the bodily). It is worth emphasizing that Brentano’s “physical phenomena” are neither bodily states, nor material objects nor events of nature. Brentano’s own examples are colors, sounds, warmth, etc., also landscapes, which in his view, exist only phenomenally and intentionally. They are primary objects or intentional contents of mental acts. This was certainly his view in the Psychologie, but later on, he seems to have interpreted his position differently by considering his intentional objects as being “things” in the ordinary sense. An interpretation that is more plausible is of Aristotelian heritage: what is an immanent content, and so “inexists” in the mind, is only the “form” (of the horse I am thinking of) and not its matter. This, however, is not the place to discuss the question how best to interpret Brentano. With this in mind, let us turn to Husserl.
Husserl discovered intentionality via Brentano and Twardowski after distinguishing between representations in which the object is not intuited, and an intuitive presentation of the same object. This distinction brings out a Spannung between the given and the not given, a “striving” towards a transcendent object, accompanied by a feeling of “lack.” In knowledge, there is a resolution of this tension. Husserl’s thinking about intentionality begins with a perception of this complex phenomenon, and at the end of his life he returns to it in the lectures on “Passive Synthesis.” Thus, the theory begins with a psychology of cognition, then — after the rejection of psychologism — moves to a theory of meaning (Investigations I & II), which is taken up into a phenomenology of knowledge (Investigation VI), With the discovery of the “epoché” (1905), the same intentionality (Ideas I) becomes constitutive of the object that is intended, and eventually of the “world.” This complex theory may be articulated in the following propositions, in that order:
P1: An intentional act refers to its object through an ideal content.
P2: As meaning-intending, it constitutes an ideal meaning.
P3: The meaning-intention is fulfilled when the object intended is itself presented
precisely as it was intended, and therewith known.
P4: With the bracketing of the object intended, the intentional act is discovered to have a structure of correlation between noesis and noema, the former being a real, temporally individuated act, the latter an ideal, non-temporal meaning.
P5: “Noema” is the product of the noesis giving meaning to sensory stuff or hyletic data.
P6: Identity of an object is constituted by overlapping noemata which enter into a synthesis of “coincidence” (Deckung).
P7: “Existence,” “non-existence,” “possibility,” “fictional,” etc., are properties of the noema, which correspond to the appropriate thetic qualities of acts.
P8: The thing itself, or true being, is the correlate of the idea of perfect and final fulfillment. “Being” and “Truth” coincide.”
P9: Intentionality is a temporal process of striving after truth but exhibits at its core a logical structure, as described in P1- P7.
Intentionality and Time
This core theory must now be inserted into a phenomenology of time and, without disturbing the central structure, allowed to undergo necessary expansion and modification. The elements which are most susceptible to “temporalization” are: the ego (so long not mentioned above), the hylé and the act. The temporality we are talking about is obviously not the objective time in which transcendent things and processes of the world take place but the immanent, phenomenological time of immanent acts and contents, this latter time having been disclosed by an appropriate epoché. It is in this immanent time that we shall find, through reflection, the genesis of the hyletic data, the acts, and the ego — in fine, of active intentionality. Let us recall the thesis, advanced in the 1905 lectures on time-consciousness, that the immanent flow of consciousness is constituted by the retentions and protentions, and by the double intentionality, the so-called longitudinal and transversal intentionalities.
Now we can formulate the following structures, which Husserl gradually came to discover in the Bernau and the C-manuscripts:
P10: In the “original” process of time-consciousness, every presentation as a now is a fulfillment of an expectation-intention.
P11: There is a continuous distancing from the source point of the now as a new now emerges — one is the primary retention, the other is a presentification of it as a presenting of the past.
P12: Protention is a tendency, a passive expectation. Retention also has its protentional element. Retention and Protention — penetrate each other.
P13: There is no absolute beginning, no Ur-datum which is not a fulfillment of a prior protention. We are always in the middle of an endless process. Any arbitrary point can be treated as a null-point.
P14: In every phase of it, consciousness is both intention towards something, and also intention away from something (which appear as positive and negative tendencies). Intentionality has now to be studied in the sphere of passivity prior to the emergence of the active ego with its acts.
P15: To the passive sphere belong the intentional associations, tendencies, drives, and affections of feelings.
P16: Originally ego-less within the “living present,” the I first appears as the“functioning” I, not yet as the subject-pole; then as a “place” where the original stream and constitution of the world takes place; and finally an entity constituted in reflection. Sartre is partially vindicated.
P17: (Returning to the act-intentionalities, one should now say) the noema is not a-temporal, but omni-temporal.
Intentionality in Intersubjectivity
P18: Empathy, as an intentional act, presents (to the empathizing ego) a new kind of transcendence, the other (the empathized) ego.
This transcendence is very different from the transcendence of things given in sensory perception. The latter are constituted meaning-unities, the former are not, but exist in themselves. The transcendence of the other ego is a stronger transcendence. (Note that Levinas does not see this in Husserl.)
P19: My ego and the other egos do not have any real connection. Their only connection is intentional.
P20: The community of egos, through its “communalized intentionality,” constitutes one identical world as its ideal correlate.
P21: The process by which the child builds up his idea of the world corresponds to the reflective delineation of the steps of constitution of the world. Genetic phenomenology and developmental intentional psychology are correlates.
P22: Empathy with the other ego may lead in either direction: either “I take over” his position by identifying with him, or I may distance myself from him.
By the former, a common world, between him and me, is constituted. However, I cannot “take over” the practical intentions (desires and willings) of others.
P23: The world is the horizon of possible consistent coincidence with the others.
P24: A community is constituted by personal acts of “intimation” and “sharing,” through an intuitive presentification, in empathy, of the other egos. Mutual empathy is a presupposition of successful communication, whose basic form is “addressing” the other who understands me as so addressing, such that the meaning content of my communicative intention reaches into the other who understands me as so intending. A “we “ in a special sense is being thereby constituted.
P25: Social acts are so constituted that a personal act takes part in the life of the co-members, actual or potential. A “many-headed” subjectivity (of a social unity) is thereby constituted, which is such that even if there is no continuity between the streams of consciousness of the egos, one ego intentionally contains the other egos.
P26: A special category of intentionality of the ego is the sexual desire, at first indeterminate, then having a determinate correlate in the other, reaching its fulfillment in a being-in-one-another of two fulfillments.
P27: The sexual drive leads to “generations” and “cultural traditions,” an important step in the “self-mundanisation” of the transcendental ego.
Husserl’s critics need to take this entire theory into consideration, just as his followers have to build on it through a process of internal, phenomenological critique.