Notes on Jean-Paul Sartre’s Intentionality: A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology

Sartre was invigorated by Husserl’s attempt to ground philosophy in affective, sensuous and naturally present experience. Far more successful at capturing nature’s reality herself than realists and idealists’ “mental surrogates for the real” ever could!

In an essay written by Sartre in 1939 on intentionality, Jean-Paul captures the scene like this. Realists and Idealists fail to escape Descarte’s cogito “I think and so I am”, constructing reality mechanically with the intellect rather than discovering it with the senses. What Sartre calls “digestive philosophy” would take a meteorite or a flower to be a “Certain assemblage of “contents of consciousness”, “ through a process similar to a spider trapping “things in its web…reducing them to its own substance.” It failed to dawn on them that the meteorite was the actual object we point to in the sky and the flower is what we hold in hand. The conceptual assimilation of the intellect of “things to ideas, of ideas by ideas, of minds by minds" as Laland is quoted carries in attitude into the world; one of “assimilation, unification, identification”. This attitude and methodology doomed philosophers to find at the bottom of every well they dig, only a reflection of themselves.          

A realist will encounter a tree in its absolute form, enter into communication with and dissolve the absolute into a realistic impression of this tree. Husserl and Sartre contend that we can’t dissolve a tree “in consciousness”, consciousness and the tree do not share soluble natures. A phenomenologist will only ever have a relative view of the world external to consciousness, never an absolute one. Although “consciousness and the world are given at one stroke”, consciousness, reducible not to a “physical image” but to the flash of light that took the image, cannot dissolve into the tree even if it were to fly out of the “moist gastric intimacy” of our bodies and hugged the tree. Conciouenss still wouldn’t fall into the tree because the tree is “beyond” the observer, and the observer “beyond” the tree.

Sartre draws from conciouenss’ illuminating, dynamic, and irreducible nature, that in keeping honest with oneself, “knowledge could not…be compared to possession”. Purified consciousness for Sartre, a clear “strong wind” has “nothing in it but a movement of fleeing itself” (4). Although the world sits outside of consciousness, consciousness has no insides to enter, rather it is like a “whirlwind” of “being beyond itself” (5). This “flight” beyond oneself belongs to Husserl’s famous maxim that “all consciousness is consciousness of something.” Sartre notes that consciousness “fly[s] out into the world” from the no-thingness of consciousness and teh world to emerge on the other side as “consciousness in the world”. An observation that Sartre credits to Heiddger’s notion of being-in-the-world, that being can’t be divided from the world it emerges from. Despite “recoup[ing] itself” consciousness “destroys itself” as the necessary condition for “consciousness that exists as consciousness of something other than itself.” This self-nhilating feature of consciousness to fly outwards into the world, the surpassing of itself as affective experiences of “hatred, love, fear, sympathy”, Husserl calls intentionality. Our “subjective” ways of “discovering the world” are given affective weight in reality and are intimately tied to properties we find in the world. Sartre praises Husserl for delivering us from the “internal life” that has been relocated to the outside world. Our selves are now our in the open, outside, in thew world, among others. “It is not in some hiding place that we will discover ourselves; it is on the road, in the town, in the midst of the crowd, a thing among things, a man among men.”