The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss by David Bentley Hart

Author:David Bentley Hart [Hart, David Bentley]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Literature & Fiction, Genre Fiction, Coming of Age, Historical, Jewish, Literary, World Literature
Amazon: B00K0PMU9O
Publisher: Audible Studios
Published: 2012-12-31T22:00:00+00:00

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5. Intentionality. The Latin verb intendere means, among other things, to “direct toward,” “aim at,” or “reach for.” In the philosophy of mind, the term “intentionality” refers not simply to a volitional tendency, but to the fundamental power of the mind to direct itself toward something. Intentionality is the mind’s capacity for “aboutness,” by which it thinks, desires, believes, means, represents, wills, imagines, or otherwise orients itself toward a specific object, purpose, or end. Intentionality is present in all perception, conception, language, cogitation, imagination, expectation, hope, and fear, as well as in every other determinate act of the conscious mind. It is what allows for conscious meaning, for references to or propositions about or representations of anything. The term was introduced into modern philosophy (drawing on scholastic precedent) by the brilliant Franz Brentano (1838–1917), a thinker more often invoked than read. For Brentano, intentionality is the very “mark of the mental,” and is of its nature something entirely absent from the merely material physical order. Moreover, for Brentano there is no real act of consciousness that is not in some sense informed by this intentionality, not even the barest act of cognition.

At the simplest phenomenological level, it is not difficult to demonstrate that a certain degree of conscious and purposive attentiveness is needed for the mind to know clearly even the content of sense impressions. For instance, if one takes up a cup and drinks from it expecting to taste a dark ale, only instead to swallow a draught of wine, the immediate effect is not one of recognition but of cognitive dissonance; only as one adjusts one’s intentional orientation does one taste the wine as wine rather than as just a confusing contradiction of one’s expectations. What has happened is that at first the content of one’s intentionality was met only in part by the content of one’s experience—one experienced the drink as a liquid but not as ale—and so the mind had to retreat for an instant and intend the experience anew, so that the sense data could be organized (rather as if by a kind of formal cause) into a coherent act of consciousness. Much the same thing occurs in the case of optical illusions, of the sort one can choose to see in more than one way, as one consciously decides to do: as a result of a very specific intentional act, one can make oneself see the same figure as either a duck or a rabbit, or as either a vase or a pair of counterposed human profiles. These, however, are fairly trivial and local examples of the far deeper and more ubiquitous truth that the mind knows nothing in a merely passive way, but always has an end or meaning toward which it is purposively directed, as toward a final cause. In every act of representation, the intending mind invests perception with meaning by directing itself toward a certain determinate content of experience, and by thus interpreting each experience as an experience of this or that reality.

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