Abstract
This paper discusses the nature of consciousness’ intrinsic intentionality from a transcendental-phenomenological viewpoint. In recent philosophy of mind the essentially intentional character of consciousness has become obscured because the latter is predominantly understood in terms of “qualia” or the “what-it-is-like-ness” of mental states and it is hard to see why such subjective “feels”, of all things, could bestow states with objective reference. As the paper attempts to demonstrate, this is an inadequate understanding of consciousness, which should instead be defined in terms of presence. Consciousness essentially takes place as presence-of, i.e., consists in something coming to appearance. This presence-of is not only a fundamental, irreducible phenomenon, but also in a radical sense un-naturalisable. Naturalism only knows “nature”, as the world of objects, and the question of intentionality then seems to be how certain inner-worldly objects can be “representations” of other inner-worldly objects. In fact, no object is ever intrinsically “about” anything. This is exclusively the nature of subjectivity qua consciousness, which is not an object alongside other objects but rather exists as the manifestation of objects.
Highlights
Intentionality is the characteristic of mental states of being about or of something: to perceive means to perceive something, to think means to think about something, to remember means to remember something, and so forth
Eliminativism about intentionality (e.g. Churchland 2002)—being a thesis about the world and our place in it that claims that nothing was ever ‘‘about’’ anything—seems to be plainly self-defeating and a nonstarter
Even though with each change on the noetic side there necessarily is a change of some noematic aspect, there is a form of identity we find in the noema—the identity of the same appearing object—which is not to be found in the permanent flux of the noeses
Summary
Intentionality is the characteristic of mental states of being about or of something: to perceive means to perceive something, to think means to think about something, to remember means to remember something, and so forth. Churchland 2002)—being a thesis about the world and our place in it that claims that nothing was ever ‘‘about’’ anything—seems to be plainly self-defeating and a nonstarter.1 This leaves the reductionist version of the naturalisation project: Intentionality, like everything mental, is viewed as not belonging to the basic, nonreducible features of nature; it must consist in something else, more basic This ‘‘robot reply’’ (as Searle calls it) corresponds in principle to the basic idea of the program of naturalising intentionality, according to which— broadly speaking—inner states have their intentional content by virtue of their causally co-varying with certain environmental conditions and/or their having, for the actions of the system, the function of indicating such conditions. The paradoxicality of this state of affairs leads me to very briefly address—in Sect. 4—the transcendental-idealist view of the consciousnessworld relationship, according to which the world is in some sense just as intrinsically consciousness-related as consciousness is world-related
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