◆ 1 What Is Intentionality, and Why Is It Important?
The core doctrine in phenomenology is the teaching that every act of consciousness we perform, every experience that we have, is intentional: it is essentially “consciousness of” or an “experience of” something or other. All our awareness is directed toward objects.
Every act of consciousness, every experience, is correlated with an object. Every intending has its intended object.
In phenomenology, “intending” means the conscious relationship we have to an object.
◆ THE PUBLICNESS OF MIND
Phenomenology shows that the mind is a public thing, that it acts and manifests itself out in the open, not just inside its own confines. Everything is outside. The very notions of an “intramental world” and an “extramental world” are incoherent; they are examples of what Ezra Pound called “idea-clots”. The mind and the world are correlated with one another. Things do appear to us, things truly are disclosed, and we, on our part, do display, both to ourselves and to others, the way things are.
Phenomenology recognizes the reality and truth of phenomena, the things that appear. It is not the case, as the Cartesian tradition would have us believe, that “being a picture” or “being a perceived object” or “being a symbol” is only in the mind. They are ways in which things can be. The way things appear is part of the being of things; things appear as they are, and they are as they appear. Things do not just exist; they also manifest themselves as what they are.
For phenomenology, there are no “mere” appearances, and nothing is “just” an appearance. Appearances are real; they belong to being. Things do show up. Phenomenology allows us to recognize and to restore the world that seemed to have been lost when we were locked into our own internal world by philosophical confusions. Things that had been declared to be merely psychological are now found to be ontological, part of the being of things. Pictures, words, symbols, perceived objects, states of affairs, other minds, laws, and social conventions are all acknowledged as truly there, as sharing in being and as capable of appearing according to their own proper style.
◆ THE NATURAL ATTITUDE
The world is more like a context, a setting, a background, or a horizon for all the things there are, all the things that can be intended and given to us; the world is not another thing competing with them. It is the whole for them all, not the sum of them all, and it is given to us as a special kind of identity. We could never have the world given to us as one item among many, nor even as a single item: it is given only as encompassing all the items. It contains everything, but not like any worldly container. The term “world” is a singulare tantum; there could only be one of them.
The world is the ultimate setting for ourselves and for all the things we experience. The world is the concrete and actual whole for experience.
Paradoxically, the I is a thing in the world, but it is a thing like no other: it is a thing in the world that also cognitively has the world, the thing to whom the world as a whole, with all the things in it, manifests itself. The I is the dative of manifestation. It is the entity to whom the world and all the things in it can be given, the one who can receive the world in knowledge.
The world as a whole and the I as the center are the two singularities between which all other things can be placed. The world and the I are correlated with one another in a way different from the manner in which a particular intentionality is correlated with the thing that it intends. The world and the ego provide an ultimate dual, elliptical context for everything.
Our belief is correlated with the being of things, which first and foremost is simply accepted as such.
World belief is not subject to correction or refutation the way any particular belief is. If we are alive at all as conscious beings, world belief is there undergirding any particular conviction we may exercise. We never really learn or acquire our world belief, the way we might achieve our belief in, say, the Empire State Building or the San Juan River in Utah. All such particular beliefs arise concomitantly when we experience or hear about the thing in question, when we come to acknowledge its identity through the manifolds in which it is given to us, whether in presence or in absence. But we could never learn or acquire our world belief. What would be our state prior to learning it? We would have to be in a mute and encapsulated solipsism, a sheer awareness that was not aware of anything. Such a state is inconceivable; it would require that the ego think of itself as both the center of things and the sum of things, a hub without a radius. And even if we were to grant its possibility, what on earth (or even outside the earth) could jar us out of such a state? How could the very idea of something “outside” ever arise if it were not there from the beginning?
We cannot start off in the egocentric predicament; our world belief is there from the start, even before we are born, as far back as we go. Even our most rudimentary sense of self could not arise except on the basis of world belief.
Since we live in the paradoxical condition of both having the world and yet being part of it, we know that when we die the world will still go on, since we are only a part of the world, but in another sense the world that is there for me, behind all the things I know, will be extinguished when I am no longer part of it.
◆ THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL ATTITUDE
If we are to give a descriptive analysis of any and all of the intentionalities in the natural attitude, we cannot share in any of them. We must take a distance to, reflect upon, and make thematic any and all of them. This means that while we are in the phenomenological attitude, we suspend all the intentionalities that we are examining. We neutralize them.
When we move into the phenomenological attitude, we become something like detached observers of the passing scene or like spectators at a game. We become onlookers. We contemplate the involvements we have with the world and with things in it, and we contemplate the world in its human involvement. We are no longer simply participants in the world; we contemplate what it is to be a participant in the world and in manifestations. But the intentionalities that we contemplate — the convictions, doubts, suspicions, certainties, and perceptions that we examine and describe — are still our intentions. We have not lost them; we only contemplate them. They remain exactly as they were, and their objects remain exactly as they were, with the same correlations between intentions and objects still in force. In a very curious way, we suspend them all just as they are, we “freeze” them in place. And we who become philosophical are also the same selves who exercise natural intentionalities.
Thus, when we enter into phenomenological reflection, we do not restrict our focus just to the subjective side of consciousness; we do not focus only on the intentionalities. We also focus on the objects that are given to us, but we focus on them as appearing to us in our natural attitude. In the natural attitude we head directly toward the object; we go right through the object’s appearances to the object itself. From the philosophically reflective stance, we make the appearances thematic. We look at what we normally look through.
I apologise for the long post. This is from notes taken while reading the book.
Philosophy is the lens through which we read the suttas. By merely choosing a more appropriate philosophy, one can greatly reduce the need for guesswork and mystification, as well as reveal the actual core of the Dhamma - all that which purely philosophy cannot resolve, and which is the knowledge that only Buddhas, not philosophers or scholars, can give. Conversely, if one approaches the suttas with a less appropriate philosophy, the essence of the Dhamma may simply get lost amid what are, in fact, purely philosophical contradictions, the complexity and mysticism of which derive only from the fact that the reader’s philosophy is incompatible with that of the author.
