Page 332 - Contribution To Phenomenology

PHENOMENOLOGICAL SOCIAL THEORY 325

he was responding to it as well. This is true, and this could lead us in
one of the two directions: either to argue, as some do, that intentionaUty
is aheady present in Kant; or alternatively, that what counts in Husserl
is not so much the concept of intentionaUty as his "transcendental"
treatment of this concept, a treatment he inherited from Kant. One could
profitably pursue either of these lines; the affinity between Kant and
Husserl has been stressed by many, notably by Husserl himself. For the
moment I would like to put aside this interesting question in order to
focus on Husserl and to explain in what way his treatment of inten-
tionaUty responds to the situation I have been speaking about.
If the historical-inteUectual situation really was as I have described it,
intentionaUty can be seen as a brilUant stroke, a way of killing at least
two birds with one stone and saving the day for philosophy and above
aU for "man."
On the one hand it responds to the skeptical soUpsistic problem. If
"aU consciousness is consciousness of something," then human experience
essentiaUy refers beyond itself, indeed is purely outside itself, in the
world, with and at its objects. Sartre was right in insisting that if
intentionaUty is taken seriously, there can be nothing left in consciousness,
no "ideas," in the sense of modern philosophy, with which it is conver-
sant, only the world outside, without which consciousness could not be
what it is. Thus there can be no problem of estabUshing indirect contact
with the external world, much less of inferring its existence from some
intermediate entities, since our contact with it is direct To this extent
our knowledge of it is assured; we can be sure that what we know is
reaUy about it and not somehow merely about the contents of our minds.
But even more remarkably, while it puts us in direct touch with the
natural order, the concept of intentionaUty at the same time Uberates us
from that very order. For it ascribes to us certain properties or features
which have no place in the natural world: consciousness-of, reference, In-
der-Welt-Sein, 6tre-au-monde. As the phenomenologists are at pains to
point out, our way of being in the world is totaUy incommensurable with
the way in which natural objects coexist: they are in the world but they
don't have a world; things don't mean anything to them. Only for a
conscious being, a being in the world in Heidegger's or Merleau-Ponty's
sense, do things have meaning. For such a being, for us, that is, nature
is assured as our habitat and miUeu, our world, our place, the phenomen-
on which is there over against us, but which we can know, whose
mysteries and secrets we can penetrate, which we can make our own.