1. A Common-Sense View

Intentionality, according to Husserl, is the hallmark of consciousness. Consciousness alone possesses intentionality. By intentionality consciousness is unerringly to be distinguished from all other empirical phenomena.

To say that consciousness is intentional is to say that consciousness at the very least is “consciousness OF something.” This, so to speak, is the minimum formula of consciousness. There is no such thing as mere “consciousness” or “awareness”; there is only consciousness OF something, awareness OF an object. Taking this as our basic formula, we would then have consciousness at its irreducible minimum as mere awareness or “cognition.” Only infrequently are we thus merely aware. Usually we perform cognitive acts in conjunction with more complex acts of emotion and feeling and will. Cognition is here overlaid, as it were, with higher acts of evaluation and decision, which will not reduce to simple acts of awareness. To be angry at someone, for example, or to love someone, is to be more than merely aware of the person in question. Although more than cognitive, these higher acts all involve cognition as a basis or “founding level.” We may say, then, that every act of consciousness either is or involves the awareness OF something as its object, i.e., it either is or involves an act of cognition.

Confining our attention to the elementary level of cognition we may then go on to note that to be aware of an object is in every instance to be doing something, to be active. Even when sunk in the deepest lassitude our faculties are yet at play; the most idle onlooking or daydreaming is still an activity we are carrying on. Since awareness is an act or activity of consciousness, it is most appropriately expressed by the use of an active verb. For this reason the verb “refer to” or “mean” is to be preferred to the lifeless expression “being OF.” A still better locution is the classical word “intend,” from which “intentional” and “intentionality” derive. To “be OF” or “refer to” or “mean” an object is to “intend” that object.

The Latin word intentio, from intendere, means etymologically a stretching out or reaching toward, implying an exertion of will. It is chiefly with this connotation of will that the English words “intend” and “intention” are used today, as when we say “I am not sure what he intends,” or “His intentions are not clear.” This connotation of will, however, must be reduced to a minimum when we use the word in its classic sense; we must allow it to connote nothing more than that we are directing our conscious glance at something as an object. This would concede that awareness, like all conscious activity, springs from an effort of will, that cognition is a voluntary act. But it would stress the fact that the volition here involved is solely cognitive in intent, that its aim is only to bring to awareness an object as such. Intention as cognitive act, therefore, is carefully to be distinguished from intention as deliberative act of will. Cognition is the more elementary act and underlies, as we have noted, all higher acts of will.

Intending, then, is an act or activity of consciousness and is best expressed as such by the active verb “intend.” Now to intend an object is plainly to relate consciousness to that object, and that object to consciousness. This relation is the “intentional relation”—or OF-relation, awareness being OF its object—and is a structural feature of all intending. Although it is but a static feature of the active intending itself, this intentional relation is nonetheless essential to awareness; remove it and you remove awareness and all intending. But it is not similarly essential to the object of awareness; remove the relation and you remove the object “from consciousness,” but you do not otherwise affect the object at all. If it be an empirical object, it is and remains what it was. Even if it be a purely imaginary object, it is still relatively independent of any given act of awareness, since we can bring it to awareness, i.e., imagine it repeatedly. These “unreal” objects I leave aside for the time being and confine my attention to the “real” objects of experience.

To these objects the intentional relation is quite unessential or “external,” whereas to consciousness the intentional relation is, as already remarked, essential or “internal.” Another way of saying this is that the intentional relation “really” relates awareness to its object, but only “nominally” relates the object to awareness. Being thus attached in very different ways to awareness and object the intentional relation is not reversible or symmetrical, but strictly irreversible or asymmetrical; it is strictly one-way and can properly be read in one direction only, as “awareness OF object,” not as “object of awareness.” When we reverse the order of the terms and read “object of awareness,” we find that the relation expressed by “of” is not the same as that expressed by “OF” in the phrase “awareness OF object.” For awareness is “OF” its object in the sense of intending it, whereas the object is “of” awareness not in the sense of intending anything, but in the passive sense of being intended by awareness.

This asymmetry of the intentional relation is plainly a consequence of the fact that it is awareness which does the intending, not the object. This is to say that the intentional relation takes its source in awareness and terminates in the object. Obviously it is anchored to its source as it is not to its terminus. It is, in a sense, the very core of awareness. It is not the core of the object. It merely touches the object from the outside, so to speak, remaining “external” so as not in any way to alter the object and thereby render it other than as it was intended, namely, as being just what it is.

Because of the asymmetry of the intentional relation, no act of awareness can be merely OF itself. A cognitive act that intended only itself would have solely its own intending to intend and hence would actually intend nothing at all. Clearly every act of awareness must be OF something other than itself. This inescapable otherness of act and object does not in the least preclude introspection or reflection. It simply says that in refleeting on acts of consciousness, the act reflected on must be numerically distinct from the reflecting act: that one act can be reflected on only by another act, and so on ad infinitum, as Spinoza correctly observed.

This otherness of act and object has a consequence of great importance. It implies that actual awareness requires originally the “givenness” of an independently existing object in order that consciousness may have anything to intend at all. For were there no such object originally “given,” consciousness would have to remain an unactualized potency, for sheer lack of anything other than itself to intend. To remove this lack and to set consciousness off on its intentional career a real object must be given to consciousness ab extra. Only then, after this original awereness of the externally real, can consciousness turn on itself and discover the internally real. This would agree with Aristotle’s dictum that there is no knowledge of the mind prior to the knowledge of things. This point is of signal importance, for it stresses two things: 1) the basic role of outer or sense perception, and 2) the primitive sense of perception generally as actually apprehending what is really “there” to be apprehended and “given” as such—“discovery,” as I have called it.

The general purport of all this is unmistakable. It is that consciousness is not a windowless monad locked in the solitary confinement of its own sensations, ideas, and other inner contents. It is that consciousness, by virtue of its intentional essence, is a singularly transparent inwardness into which external existence can freely “shine,” and which prior to this shining-in of the real is but an empty interior devoid of furniture. Consciousness on this intentional view is not closed to the real, but open to it, with as many openings as there are varieties of intending, beginning with sense perception and going on to memory, imagination, thought, conception, judgment, and so on. Intentional consciousness, in a word, is a non-monadic consciousness open to all that is; only a nonintentional consciousness can be closed, monadic.

Being open to all that is, consciousness can reach out and grasp, apprehend, comprehend, embrace—the metaphors are many—outer objects, the world and all that is. It does this, of course, only intentionally, not really or literally, that is, in the wholly unique manner of awareness. The world, on the other hand, embraces, comprehends consciousness really and literally, not intentionally. The contrast here between the adverbs “intentionally” and “really” reflects the corresponding contrast between the two ends of the intentional relation.

But what does it mean to be a content of consciousness intentionally? Does it mean that we have an “idea” of an outer object and that this “idea” somehow corresponds to the outer object, serving as its representative in consciousness? There is no place in this intentional view of consciousness for the “idea” in this traditional sense, or for the traditional “representative theory of perception.” Outer objects are present to consciousness not by virtue of “ideas,” but solely by virtue of the acts that intend them. The “idea,” devoid of intention, therefore, must give way to the intentional act.

The difference between act and idea can hardly be exaggerated; it is as wide as the difference between the presence and absence of intentionality. An idea does not intend anything; an act intends its object. Or rather, an act is the intending of its object. In enacting the act, in performing or “living” the act, I am doing the intending; and what I intend is the object, not the act itself. In actually looking at a statue, for instance, I am looking at the statue, not at my looking. To be sure, I am not wholly oblivious of my act; but my awareness of it is quite peripheral, vague, more potential than actual and requiring a radical shift of attention to become fully actual. In the first instance, therefore, the act is not an object of awareness, but—precisely—an act of awareness. Only in the second instance, so to speak, does it become an actual object, when, namely, it is intended by a further act of reflection or introspection. It is thereupon discovered to be what it is, an act of intending, an inner “object” henceforth to be sharply distinguished from outer objects. Now if the basis of all intending is outer existence, as I argued above, we may then say that outer objects are objects of first intention and inner objects are objects of second intention. Not only acts but all that pertains essentially to them, intentionality, the intentional relation, and all, are objects of second intention.

The difference between act and idea becomes still more striking when we now note the dual nature of acts. Every act possesses an intrinsic quality in that it is at once both “real” and “intentional.” This duality may be likened to a pair of dimensions; every act of awareness has a psychical (“real”) and an intentional dimension, and both are vital.

Viewed in its psychical dimension an act of awareness is a real but passing event in a living stream of consciousness. In this stream, consisting most!y of acts, each act in due course is enacted and having been thus “lived” vanishes forthwith into an irretrievable past. As an act of consciousness it is, of course, an instance of an operation; i.e., it is a particular act of seeing or hearing, of perceiving or remembering, of imagining or thinking, and so on. To this extent each act shares in the permanence of the operation which it exemplifies. This permits us to identify its species and to give the act a date and a duration. But it discloses nothing more of the unique individuality of the act as a living segment of consciousness.

Only in the intentional dimension is this individuality fully displayed. An individual act of awareness is the actual intending of just this or that (real or imaginary, particular or general) object, and of nothing else. For example, I never merely see or imagine or think; I see this sheet of paper, imagine a unicorn, think of Julius Caesar. My act is never merely an instance of an operation; it is also a full, concrete intending of this or that object, exactly this and nothing else. It is, therefore, precisely this object—the paper, the unicorn, Julius Caesar—that makes my act in each instance what it actually and fully is. It is, I repeat, the object intended that gives my act the fullness of its individual being.

It is the office of the intentional relation to allow the object to exercise this vital role, to make the object willy nilly an integral part of the act itself. This is to say that since the intentionality of the act is its “being OF its object,” its own being is to this extent one with the being of the object itself; the act is its object—intentionally. And since every act is a living segment of my conscious self, what 1 am doing in each act is “sharing” for the moment in the being of the object intended, becoming one with it—again, intentionally, not really. This, 1 think, is what Aristotle meant when he said that the soul in knowing becomes in a way the object known. The “way” in question is the utterly unique way of intentionality.

Only when viewed under both dimensions does the act of awareness reveal the qualities of the living process which it actually is. Sharing really in the being of the self or psyche and intentionally in the being of the object, its own being is that of an entity which cannot be itself without being also an other (the object which it is “OF”). This peculiar duality of being both self and other is particularly striking with objects of first intention. To say, in these instances, that “being an other” is only intentional, not real, is not to say that it is fictional or imaginary or unreal to the act. It is rather to emphasize the uniqueness of the intentional act as a being which preserves the distinctness of self and other while yet allowing the other, even in its distinctness, to enter into the composition of the self. To grasp this is to grasp intentionality, the intentional relation, the act of awareness, being as “being OF” its object. It is also to understand how and why intentional consciousness is not a monad sealed within itself, but an avid openness to all that is, a limitless capacity of “becoming” all things.

This brings to a head my sketch of intentionality. My aim being not completeness, but synopsis, I concentrated in a quite general way on intentionality as the essential and distinguishing feature of consciousness, consciousness as a minimum, mere cognition or awareness. This deployed itself in a number of themes: intending as the primordial activity of consciousness; the intentional act as the unit of this activity (and its difference from “idea”); the intentional relation with its asymmetry; the nature of intentional being (becoming intentionally the object, the object becoming intentionally a “content”); and lastly, our intentional involvement from the beginning with otherness and existence, in treating of these themes I looked chiefly at the species of intentionality called outer or sense perception with its objects of first intention. Of the many other genera and species 1 made only the barest mention, not even noting the important difference between perceptual intending on the one hand and conceptual and judgmental intending on the other. But for all these deficiencies I think I have made clear in outline the sharp contrast between an intentional view of consciousness and the traditional view of mind as a receptacle of sensations and ideas.

One further word. Intentionality as I conceive it is an empirical phenomenon, a feature of the natural world to be observed and described in the natural attitude. But it is a most singular feature. It springs only from psychic centers whence it radiates outward bathing the world in a glow of apprehension, so to speak, making it for the first time an “object” in the sense of an “object of consciousness.” The transformation, to be sure, is hardly more than nominal; nothing is really changed save the psychic centers. And yet, all is vastly different, as different as light from darkness. For in evolving these psychic centers, the world has rendered itself luminous to consciousness, transparent to natural inquiry. In doing this the world has added to its original “being” the further sense of “being known.” Or, it has added to its “real” dimension an “intentional” dimension and therewith cloaked itself in a veritable “noosphere,” to use once again the suggestive term of Teilhard de Chardin. But enough! My point is that intentionality is not only a psychic phenomenon; it is also a cosmic phenomenon. In its cosmic aspect it is that dimension of the real which provides the meeting place of self and world, subject and object, mind and matter, inner and outer, and other monadic opposites. As the great conciliating medium intentionality is one of the neglected wonders of creation, perhaps the profoundest of all commonplaces, and surely one of the central themes for any theory of mind and man.

The contrast between this intentional view of consciousness with its two dimensions and the traditional monadic view with its single dimension is now evident. The traditional view was introduced by Descartes when he took to sensations and ideas. If he learned anything about intentio from his scholastic training at La Fleche, he rejected it out of hand. For in relating sensations to outer things as effects to causes, he denied by implication that they are intentionally related as awareness to object. In effect, then, Descartes replaced the intentional relation with the causal relation and thereby denied to ideas their cognitive character, their intentional function. Thus deprived, ideas shrank to the status of contents in the stream of consciousness, contents wherein awareness and object are somehow one. With intentionality this ambiguous oneness of awareness and object would have been impossible; without intentionality it was almost inevitable. And so it was the neglect of intentionality, as much as anything else, which gave license to the new theory of sensations and ideas.

2. Husserl’s View

Husserl would not agree with this account of intentionality. He would agree that consciousness is indeed intentional, that intentionality involves an intentional relation between act and object, and that this intentional relation involves in turn the sharp distinction between awareness and object. But he would flatly oppose what I said about the intentional relation: 1) that it is real at the subject end, but nominal at the object end; and 2) that in outer perception consciousness contains its object only intentionally, not really. He would stoutly maintain the opposite: 1) that the intentiona! relation is real at both ends; and consequently 2) that in outer perception consciousness contains its object really, not merely intentionally.*

I use here the conditional “would” because Husserl did not expressly reject the two theses which I espoused and did not explicitly formulate his own theses in opposition. He was apparently quite unaware of “my” theses and hence of any opposition to his own. Being unaware of this opposition he was not moved to state his own theses. Had he done so, he would have examined carefully the logical properties of the intentional relation and particularly how it attaches to its object. This he did not do. Instead, he simply took it quietly for granted that the intentional relation is internal to both act and object—though doubtless not in exactly the same way—and inferred from this that the object, no less than the act, must be “internal” to consciousness. This inference he stated explicitly. In making this explicit statement he was averring implicitly that consciousness contains its object not merely intentionally but really, and this because the intentional relation is real at both ends. It is only by implication, then, that Husserl holds to the two theses which I ascribe to him, and by implication that he opposes mine. Let us take a closer look at Husserľs theses and their consequences.

Husserl’s theses are connected as ground and consequence. If the intentional relation is real or internal to the object, as it is to the act (the first thesis), then this relation must bind act and object together in a real unity which can be no other than a unity of consciousness, since intending springs from consciousness alone, hence consciousness must really contain its object (second thesis). The first thesis leads to the second; the second follows from the first. From the two thus conjoined follows a third, the grand thesis of transcendental phenomenology, that all intending of outer objects is constituting. For if consciousness really contains its object, then obviously the object must be a product or “accomplishment” (Leistung) of consciousness, a mere “intentional correlate” constituted by the intending act. The perceived object, in other words, must be a “presentation” or Vorstellung—though not an “idea” in the traditional sense.

Notice now what follows. Act and object are really contained in consciousness. They differ, nonetheless, as intending from intended. Clearly, they must occupy correspondingly different strata or dimensions of consciousness. The one dimension is that of the so-called “stream of consciousness,” the only dimension recognized by the tradition. The other dimension, first recognized by Husserl, is that of the object as constituted Vor-Stellung. Husserl was tireless in insisting that the object perceived is not a “content” of our stream of consciousness. Only the act is “immanent” in the stream; the object is “transcendent” of the stream. Mark well that the object is transcendent only of the stream; it is not transcendent of consciousness itself. Consciousness itself, accordingly, has the two dimensions of “immanence” and “transcendence,” or “noesis” and “поета,” as Husserl later called them. Immanent noesis and transcendent поета correspond as intending act and intended correlate.

With this distinction between immanence and transcendence Husserl has enlarged by a whole dimension the traditional view of consciousness and brought to systematic clarity the distinction between awareness and object. In doing this he has also equipped consciousness for the role of all-container, of absolute monad. For if all that is intended must be internal to consciousness, precisely because it is intended—and what, indeed, cannot be intended by consciousness in some fashion or other?—then plainly consciousness must really contain all that is, either as immanent act or transcendent thing. This implies that there is nothing, literally nothing, “outside,” or “external” to, consciousness. This is the realm of sheer nonbeing; consciousness is the realm of being. And so Husserl’s doctrine of constitution is also a doctrine of radical monadism.

Husserl’s dimensions of immanence and transcendence do not correspond to the two dimensions which my theses involve. The act, 1 said, has a real or psychic dimension in being a real event in the stream of consciousness. It has also an intentional dimension in being that through which consciousness becomes one with its object (intentionally, not really), whence consciousness may be said to contain its object only intentionally, not really. The one dimension is strictly real, the other just as strictly intentional. Husserl does not recognize a strictly intentional dimension. His immanent dimension may be as real as my psychic dimension. But his transcendent dimension is not in the same sense intentional at all; it is on the contrary real, real in the sense that consciousness really (not merely intentionally) contains its object. Neither of Husserl’s dimensions is intentional as opposed to real; they are both real. For Husserl, accordingly, intentionality is not a dimension; it is rather the relation between the two dimensions of consciousness, between immanent noesis and transcendent поета, constituting process and constituted product.

This leads to a further difference between Husserl’s view and mine. On my view both act and consciousness are two-dimensional; the act as act-of-consciousness is so far one with consciousness as to share the essential features of consciousness, namely, its real and intentional dimensions. On Husserľs view only consciousness is two-dimensional; the act has but one dimension, that of immanence. As immanent event the act is sharply distinguished from its corresponding transcendent noema, as sharply as awareness from its object. Plainly, consciousness alone possesses the two dimensions of immanence and transcendence; the act possesses but one, immanence.

Husserľs act with its one immanent dimension is manifestly a very different thing from the act I described above with its real and intentional dimensions. Husserľs act, having no intentional dimension, is intentional only in the sense of constituting its object or поета. This means simply that Husserl has equated intending and constituting; to intend an (outer) object is to constitute that object, and conversely. Furthermore, this constituting is a “real” process of “really” making a “real” поета which is “really” contained in consciousness. “Real” has here, of course, the two senses of immanence and transcendence. But in both senses it is opposed to intentional as I have construed it. There is no room for my sense of intentional. All is real. Intentionality for Husserl is not the (intentional) sharing of all being or existence; it is not the meeting place of self and other, subject and object; it is not a cosmic as well as a psychic dimension. It is exclusively a feature of a closed transcendental consciousness, its essential feature, that feature by virtue of which transcendental consciousness creates for itself a world and all that is and thus displays itself as an absolute, all-compassing monad.

Husserľs equating of intending and constituting does not seem to hold for inner perception; objects of second intention do not seem to be constituted by introspection or reflection. This is but to say, of course, that the constituting process is not itself constituted. In this event, inner intending would not be constituting, but discovering, perceiving. Assuming there would be no disagreement on this point, 1 shall leave it and return to the intending of outer objects, where the equation holds.

This equation, which is in a way the core of Husserl’s theory of constitution, follows, as I remarked above, from his first two theses. Since 1) the intentiona! relation is internal to the object as well as to the act, hence 2) every intended object must be really internal to consciousness and thus 3) must also be a product of consciousness; therefore: intending = constituting. If this be the order of priority, it would also be the order which Husserl might be expected to follow in arguing for his theory of transcendental constitution.

But, once again, Husserl never stated and never argued for the primary thesis that the intentional relation is real at both ends. He did, however, argue explicitly for the second thesis that outer objects must be internal to consciousness. In doing this he was assuming implicitly the first thesis as a suppressed premise. It is this that I want to expose in the next chapter, where I shall examine Husserl’s arguments for the second thesis.

These arguments are of two kinds. The one kind, the more detailed and specific, is that of the “transcendental reduction,” the central aim of which is to show that the alleged “outer” object of sense perception must be, as intended, an “intentional accomplishment” (Leistung) of the intending consciousness. The second kind, the less detailed and more general, was set forth on at least three separate occasions. In each of them Husseri attempts to show that a so-called “outer” object on becoming an “object of consciousness” must become thereby “internal” to consciousness.

It will be convenient to distinguish the argument of the reduction as “special” from the latter argument as “general.” In the history of natural science the special argument or theory usually precedes the general. The special theory of relativity, for example, preceded by some years the general theory. My feeling is that with Husserl the general preceded the special, for reasons which I shall later disclose. But this is of little moment here. Since I must adopt some order, I shall examine first the general argument and then the special argument.

It may be well to remark that in both arguments Husserl begins with the natural attitude. He was not one to berate the natural attitude and its naive realism. It is one of the merits of Husserl’s phenomenology that it springs from the natural attitude and from a deep respect for its deliverances. Where else, indeed, do we initially encounter “phenomena,” the “things themselves”? Eventually, to be sure, Husserl abandons the natural standpoint, but only for reasons which the natural standpoint itself allegedly provides. Our attention, therefore, will focus intently on these alleged reasons, these natural deliveranees or insights, which impelled Husserl to abandon the natural standpoint and to repair to the transcendental standpoint. Are these reasons genuine insights; or are they inferences from unstated premises, such as the premise that the intentional relation is real at both ends?

*I find it difficult to avoid this dual use of “real” in opposing it to both “nominal” and “intentional.” If “real” means the same in both instances, “nominal” and “intentional” too would presumably mean the same or very nearly the same. In fact, “nominal” and “intentional” do mean much the same. And yet, there is a difference, if only a nuance, which is desirable to stress in referring 1) to the way in which the intentional relation attaches to its object, and 2) to the way in which consciousness ineludes its object. It is preferable, I think, to say that the intentional relation attaches only “nominally” or “externally” (rather than “intentionally”) to its object, and that consciousness includes its outer object only intentionally” (rather than “nominally”).