Re: intentionality

On Thu, 23 May 1996, Theodora Lightfoot <DLIGHT@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>writes:

> What is all of this business about intentionality? I thoughtmost of us
> had moved away from a sovereign model of power in which a few
> individuals who posess power consciously oppress the rest who do not.
> I strongly doubt that anyone makes economic policy with the conscious
> intention of causing more poverty....

We need to be careful to distinguish "intentional acts" in the sense of
acts performed with an intended result and "intentionality" which to my
eyes/ears carries a specifically phenomenological coloration/inflection.

For Husserl, as for Brentano before him and and the younger generation
of theorists after him (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, even de Man and the young
Foucault), intentionality describes an essential structure of
consciousness, in which all acts of consciousness are intentional, that
is they intend something: consicousness is always consciousness *of*
something.

As such, intentionality certainly depends upon a subject as agent of
consciousness, and to that extent may be a problematic notion vis-a-vis
Butler or Foucault or any variety of poststructuralist thinkers; that is,
it's hard to theorize intentionality if you're going to do away with a
subject.

Nevertheless, intentionality in its phenomenological sense is far and
away a long way away from "authorial intent" in the sense of basing an
interpretation of a text, or event for that matter, on the what the
author or agent "intended" as the outcome or result of that text or
event; it is not at all about the use of power for the conscious or
intentional oppression of others (which is not to say that phenomenology
itself might have ideological stakes--but this is another matter).


Tom Orange
tmorange@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx




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  • Re: intentionality
    • From: Gregory A. Coolidge
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