Read Online At the Existentialist Café by Sarah Bakewell - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Sarah Bakewell
Tags: Literary, History, Biography & Autobiography, 20th Century, Philosophy, Modern, Movements, existentialism, Philosophers
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was. Husserl wrote back to him, ‘You are using the method perfectly. Just keep it up. You don’t need to know what it is; that’s indeed a difficult matter.’ In a letter to his parents, Jaspers speculated that Husserl did not know what phenomenology was either.
Yet none of this uncertainty could dim the excitement. Like all philosophy, phenomenology made great demands on its practitioners. It required‘a different thinking ’, Jaspers wrote; ‘a thinking that, in knowing, reminds me, awakens me, brings me to myself, transforms me’. It could do all that, and also give results.
Besides claiming to transform the way we think about reality, phenomenologists promised to change how we think about ourselves. They believed that we should not try to find out what the human mind is , as if it were some kind of substance. Instead, we should consider what it does , and how it grasps its experiences.
Husserl had picked up this idea from his old teacher Franz Brentano, in Vienna days. In a fleeting paragraph of his book Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint , Brentano proposed that we approach the mind in terms of its ‘intentions’ — a misleading word, which sounds like it means deliberate purposes. Instead it meant a general reaching or stretching, from the Latin root in-tend , meaning to stretch towards or into something. For Brentano, this reaching towards objects is what our minds do all the time. Our thoughts are invariably of or about something, he wrote:in love, something is loved, in hatred, somethingis hated, in judgement, something is affirmed or denied. Even when I imagine an object that isn’t there, my mental structure is still one of ‘ about -ness’ or ‘ of -ness’. If I dream that a white rabbit runs past me checking its pocket watch, I am dreaming of my fantastical dream-rabbit. If I gaze up at the ceiling trying to make sense of the structure of consciousness, I am thinking about the structure of consciousness. Except in deepest sleep, my mind is always engaged in this aboutness : it has ‘intentionality’. Having taken the germ of this from Brentano, Husserl made it central to his whole philosophy.
Just try it: if you attempt to sit for two minutes and think about nothing, you will probably get an inkling of why intentionality is so fundamental to human existence. The mind races around like a foraging squirrel in a park, grabbing in turn at a flashing phone screen, a distant mark on the wall, a clink of cups, a cloud that resembles a whale, a memory of something a friend said yesterday, a twinge in a knee, a pressing deadline, a vague expectation of nice weather later, a tick of the clock. Some Eastern meditation techniques aim to still this scurrying creature, but the extreme difficulty of this shows how unnatural it is to be mentally inert. Left to itself, the mind reaches out in all directions as long as it is awake — and even carries on doing it in the dreaming phase of its sleep.
Understood in this way, the mind hardly is anything at all: it is its aboutness. This makes the human mind (and possibly some animal minds) different from any other naturally occurring entity. Nothing else can be as thoroughly about or of things as the mind is: even a book only reveals what it’s ‘about’ to someone who picks it up and peruses it, and is otherwise merely a storage device. But a mind that is experiencing nothing, imagining nothing, or speculating about nothing can hardly be said to be a mind at all.
Husserl saw in the idea of intentionality a way to sidestep two great unsolved puzzles of philosophical history: the question of what objects ‘really’ are, and the question of what the mind ‘really’ is. By doing the epoché and bracketing out all consideration of reality from both topics, one is freed to concentrate on the relationship in the middle. One can apply one’s descriptive energies to the endlessdance of intentionality that takes place in our lives: the whirl of our minds as
Yet none of this uncertainty could dim the excitement. Like all philosophy, phenomenology made great demands on its practitioners. It required‘a different thinking ’, Jaspers wrote; ‘a thinking that, in knowing, reminds me, awakens me, brings me to myself, transforms me’. It could do all that, and also give results.
Besides claiming to transform the way we think about reality, phenomenologists promised to change how we think about ourselves. They believed that we should not try to find out what the human mind is , as if it were some kind of substance. Instead, we should consider what it does , and how it grasps its experiences.
Husserl had picked up this idea from his old teacher Franz Brentano, in Vienna days. In a fleeting paragraph of his book Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint , Brentano proposed that we approach the mind in terms of its ‘intentions’ — a misleading word, which sounds like it means deliberate purposes. Instead it meant a general reaching or stretching, from the Latin root in-tend , meaning to stretch towards or into something. For Brentano, this reaching towards objects is what our minds do all the time. Our thoughts are invariably of or about something, he wrote:in love, something is loved, in hatred, somethingis hated, in judgement, something is affirmed or denied. Even when I imagine an object that isn’t there, my mental structure is still one of ‘ about -ness’ or ‘ of -ness’. If I dream that a white rabbit runs past me checking its pocket watch, I am dreaming of my fantastical dream-rabbit. If I gaze up at the ceiling trying to make sense of the structure of consciousness, I am thinking about the structure of consciousness. Except in deepest sleep, my mind is always engaged in this aboutness : it has ‘intentionality’. Having taken the germ of this from Brentano, Husserl made it central to his whole philosophy.
Just try it: if you attempt to sit for two minutes and think about nothing, you will probably get an inkling of why intentionality is so fundamental to human existence. The mind races around like a foraging squirrel in a park, grabbing in turn at a flashing phone screen, a distant mark on the wall, a clink of cups, a cloud that resembles a whale, a memory of something a friend said yesterday, a twinge in a knee, a pressing deadline, a vague expectation of nice weather later, a tick of the clock. Some Eastern meditation techniques aim to still this scurrying creature, but the extreme difficulty of this shows how unnatural it is to be mentally inert. Left to itself, the mind reaches out in all directions as long as it is awake — and even carries on doing it in the dreaming phase of its sleep.
Understood in this way, the mind hardly is anything at all: it is its aboutness. This makes the human mind (and possibly some animal minds) different from any other naturally occurring entity. Nothing else can be as thoroughly about or of things as the mind is: even a book only reveals what it’s ‘about’ to someone who picks it up and peruses it, and is otherwise merely a storage device. But a mind that is experiencing nothing, imagining nothing, or speculating about nothing can hardly be said to be a mind at all.
Husserl saw in the idea of intentionality a way to sidestep two great unsolved puzzles of philosophical history: the question of what objects ‘really’ are, and the question of what the mind ‘really’ is. By doing the epoché and bracketing out all consideration of reality from both topics, one is freed to concentrate on the relationship in the middle. One can apply one’s descriptive energies to the endlessdance of intentionality that takes place in our lives: the whirl of our minds as
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