Theory of Intentionality in Husserl

The "theory of intentionality in Husserl" is roughly the same as phenomenology in Husserl. Intentionality or, as I prefer to say, intentiveness is almost the only subject of what Husserl called "phenomenological analysis." His descriptions of intentiveness (call them "theory" if you will) are the principal part of his philosophy. Even his socalled transcendental phenomenological idealism is little more than the outcome of a faithful account of intentiveness as he eventually saw it. This paper offers a summary description of only a few general features of intentiveness as it appeared to Edmund Husserl after he had been examining it for more than forty years. The sense of my description, I believe, is the same as that of Husserl, though I have attempted to observe and describe the phenomena that Husserl's statements are about, rather than merely to translate those statements into English. If I direct my attention reflectively to the present and immediately past temporal extent of my mental life, I find this life to be changing from moment to moment in many respects. But I note also that, no matter how widely it varies, each of its successive partial extents is intrinsically an awareness of things, an awareness of them as other than the given extent itself or any of its really immanent components. Equivalently stated: The reflectively observable stretch of my mental life is, as a whole and in each of its phases, an intending of things; it is (to revive an obsolete expression) intentive to things. Thus it has the intrinsic quality that Husserl called "lntentionalitiit," the quality that we may call, in English, "intentionality" or "intentiveness." In these statements I use the words "awareness," "intending," and "things," to express very broad senses. The word "thing" I use to express the sense in which anything whatever is something. Some things exist, and other things are non-existent. Some things are possible; other things are impossible. Some things are real; others are ideal. In short, anything that can be meant, anything that can be intended in any !llanner, is ipso facto a thing in this broadest sense of the word. "In each of its successive component extents the observable stretch of my mental life is an awareness of things." In this sentence not only the word "things," but also the word "awareness," is used to express unusually broad senses. Ordinarily, when we use the word "awareness," we are referring only to mental processes in which you, or I, or some other ego, is engaged and is