Intentionality Part 1

I'm going to split this into successive parts because the topic is so important and unavoidable that if I don't cover it correctly you'll have no grounds for understanding any subsequent phenomenological work.

What is 'intentionality' in phenomenology?

I'm going to cover intentionality first from the perspective of Husseralian Phenomenology both because this is Sokolowski's perspective and because all the subsequent major phenomenologists (Heidegger, Stein, Ingarden, Fink, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, etc) start with or by modification of Husserl's work.

A kind of relationship (the exact nature of which is disputed) of the following character:

ego – act – content → object (which may not exist)

is 'intentionality' in Husserl's sense.

It is important to understand right away that this means that the kind of intentionality we will be talking about will be that sort which is involved in conscious experience of the sort we undergo. Wider uses of 'intentionality'- say between words and their meaning or as found in plant behavior towards the sun or as found between potencies and the world, etc -while perhaps being related are not cases of 'intentionality' in the relevant sense. The reason for this strict focus stems from phenomenology being a science of 'phenomena' and their appearing. Intentionality in Husserl's sense is what's essentially involved in the showing up of every phenomena: it's an aspect of consciousness necessary such that something appears. The other cases of intentionality would be, themselves, kinds of phenomena, but they would not generally amount to aspects of consciousness that let phenomena show up.

The relationship of intentionality then is best understood for us as:

That aspect of consciousness such that every act of consciousness of essentially a relating of contents and objects such that phenomena appear.

Ego, Act, and Content

I adapt the following definitions except that of 'ego' and 'act' from David Bell's Husserl Arguments of the Philosophers:

'Consciousness' is here a primitive term used to refer to whatever belongs within the so-called ‘stream of consciousness’, i.e., within "the entire, real, phenomenological being of the empirical ego".

'An experience'  is a particular episode of consciousness. Experiences are real temporal events and, when complex, possess real parts and moments. Having a sensation, an itch for example, is an experience, as is suddenly remembering that one has left the front door unlocked.

'Acts of consciousness' are what we might call conscious processes. They are particular kinds of experiences. The word used does not mean to convey that every mental process or state involves deliberate action on the part of the subject. The main idea is merely to convey that consciousness is something that goes on as a process and plays a kind of functional role of a certain sort in the presentation of phenomena. Typical acts include fearing, hoping, imagining, judging, perceiving, remembering, and so on.  All acts are, by stipulative definition, intentional experiences; but not all experiences are acts. Husserl says "That not all experiences are intentional is proved by [the existence of sensations and sensational complexes" Having an itch, for example, is an experience which (unlike remembering that the front door is unlocked) involves no direction towards an object that is not part of that experience.

A 'content of experience' is a real part or moment that goes to make up an experience. A content of experience is therefore present in an experience in the way that any part is present in a whole of which it is a part. The content of an experience is the totality of the parts and moments that together comprise it. 

The 'ego' is in Husserl a controversial entity. It is sufficient for our purposes to say that the ego is the site of consciousness from which all acts emanate. It lives consciously, as it were. But its further character is a matter of some contention even within Husserl's own corpus. We need not cover this topic now.

With those definitions it becomes possible to say that intentionality is an act of consciousness by the ego essentially correlated with a content of an experience, which is in turn directed essentially to an object. Act and content and their analysys are more important to phenomenology than objects, but objects figure in phenomenology in important ways.

The Object

The object is basically anything which can be spoken of or anything which can be apprehended. Husserl seeks to speak of objects as apprehended, as phenomena, so they are spoken of generally in relation to content, and then generally in relation to the act of consciousness correlated with that content and object. The point here is that objects appear as meaningful things taken up in such and such a way for observers. See a summative diagram of the Husserlian object.