Intentionality and the Publicness of Mind

Abstract

Despite an unprecedented widening of the theoretical and methodological scope in IR over the last 25 years, research explicitly informed by phenomenology is rare. Rejecting the idea of phenomenology as “rigorous science” and instead understanding phenomenology as an interpretive and hermeneutic undertaking (Gadamer 1979; Heidegger 1982, 2008), this contribution offers an alternative phenomenological reading on the problem of theorizing the intertwinement of (political) actors and their environments. One of the central and most general concerns driving phenomenological research is the emphasis on intentionality and the concomitant conception of the publicness of mind. This phenomenological core insight posits intentionality as a central feature of our experience and fundamental to the formation of meaning and intelligibility of the world surrounding us. Positing the mind as always already in the world (in the sense of an existential involvement) leads the way to a reconceptualization of intentionality (Sokolowski 2000:8) that questions the still widely adhered to ontological “split” between the thinking subject and the objective world ( ibid .:11). Although scholarship in IR over the last 25 years has made some headway toward overcoming this divide, a coherent account of how the subsequent antinomies and aporias can be understood is still absent. The still protracted agent-structure debate would be a good example here (Wight 1999). While the contingency on which the relation between subjects and objects is built is (widely) recognized, a clear conceptualization of the nature, emergence, and ramifications of this intrinsic indeterminacy is so far lacking. Rather, we can observe ever more complex undertakings to secure starting points which threaten to negate the theoretical advances made by the very way they settle the indeterminate relation between subject and object. After all, it is still a widespread practice in IR to understand an event or actions by reference to objects that exist, …