This is a supplement to the previous post. I had originally wanted to make “technical intentionality” the core concept of this essay, but in the end I retreated before the difficulty and gave it up; still, because it had been brewing for so long, I feel I ought to say a few things about it.
Seven years ago in Nanning, I attended my first phenomenology and philosophy of technology conference. There was one session that left a deep impression on me, and I wrote about it in my notes from that year as well:
Professor Wu spoke about “the intentional structure in technology,” but Professor Jin disagreed with using the term in that way. He believed that only human beings have intentionality, and that a knife cannot “fly up by itself and cut someone,” so one can only say that it embodies human intentionality, not that it itself possesses an intentional structure. Here, although I myself do not like using the term “intentionality,” I am still willing to defend Professor Wu a bit. Professor Jin’s line of thought seems not yet to have escaped an anthropocentric default position, and once we compare human nature with technology as co-constituted, the status of “human” can no longer retain such a natural superiority. Here, a knife certainly cannot “by itself” fly up and cut someone, but a person, if without a knife or any tool that can cut, likewise cannot “by themself” cut someone either. A person needs the aid of some knife in order to “cut”; likewise, a knife also needs the aid of some person in order to “cut.” So since the “knife itself” does not have the intentionality of cutting, why should the “human being itself” necessarily have it? In fact, this “intentional structure” of “cutting” is jointly constituted by human and knife. In plain terms, the “human” possesses the capacity for “intention,” while the “knife” is the provider of the “structure.” Without technology, human intention can only be completely empty; technology, or rather the existence of media, is what makes an intentional structure with a determinate direction possible. If no human provides the consciousness of “cutting,” the knife certainly cannot cut on its own; but if no knife provides the structure of “cutting” (facticity, possibility), humans will not automatically generate the consciousness of “cutting” either. The so-called “intentional structure” precisely points to the “co-constitution” of human nature and technology. As for human free will, that is another matter entirely.
The development of artificial intelligence makes “the knife flying up to cut someone” no longer sound like fantasy. In fact, we already have AI-controlled surgical knives, and naturally there is no problem at all with them flying up and cutting people at will. Of course, those who insist on “human dignity” will never admit that knives can be compared with human beings. Perhaps even when robots turn around and begin to herd or slaughter humanity, there will still be many philosophy professors hiding in ivory towers who insist that robots are not human; no matter what they can do, if they are not human then they are not human… I really don’t know what meaning such a question has. I am not discussing whether robots have minds, or whether they are human. I am only asking: when a knife really can fly up and cut someone, does that count as having intentionality?
The concept of “intentionality” was mainly emphasized by Brentano and Husserl, proposed as a characteristic of psychic phenomena or acts of consciousness, and became one of the key terms of phenomenology. Later, so-called post-phenomenologists Ihde and Verbeek developed the concept of “technological intentionality.”
At the time, I felt that the concept of “technical intentionality” was indeed extremely important. In fact, in a certain sense one could even say that whether this concept can stand is bound up with whether the so-called “phenomenological philosophy of technology” can stand at all.
At that time, Professor Wu also seemed to greatly admire Ihde’s route of technological phenomenology. But in recent years, as we teachers and students of the Wu school have gained a deeper understanding of Ihde and others, especially through the work of fellow student Wu Ningning, we have developed many more doubts and cautions about Ihde’s approach. Ihde offers many formulaic and ready-made readings of phenomenology. Although these simplifications are not necessarily all objectionable, we must now distinguish them carefully.
My attitude toward the concept of “technical intentionality” has also changed somewhat. First, I still think the concept can be defended, but whether one must insist on using it is not something I am so sure about anymore.
After all, the word “intentionality” itself is a Husserlian term. Heidegger’s being-in-the-world, Merleau-Ponty’s body schema, and so on, though all influenced by the doctrine of intentionality, no longer revolve around that word.
The characteristic of phenomenology’s use of concepts is that it is “alive”; the concept itself is only a “formal indication,” and is never something worth camping out on. Not to mention Husserl to Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty, even within Heidegger alone, from his early period to his later period, there are not many concepts that he clung to throughout. Whether to use a certain concept is more a strategic question. Every concept has its power of disclosure, and also its misleading side; the key lies in weighing them against each other.
The concept of technical intentionality in “post-phenomenology” is of course reasonable, but one of its plain, straightforward meanings is nothing more than McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” or else Innis’s “bias” of media. “The medium is the message” certainly has strong power of disclosure, and the concept of “bias” is also good. It includes the sense of “bias” in relation to human beings, but with less anthropomorphism than “intentionality.”
The advantage of “intentionality” is that it points to the continuity between philosophy of technology and the phenomenological tradition. “Technical intentionality” is indeed a further extension of Husserl’s theory of intentionality. But the disadvantage is that it easily causes the discussion to fall into a “dispute over legitimacy.” Originally, you used the word intentionality precisely to gain some association with Husserl, so it is only proper that others should dig into the question of legitimacy. But being trapped in questions of legitimacy is unfavorable to us.
Still, even if I do not necessarily think insisting on the term “technical intentionality” is a good strategy, I am still willing to defend its “legitimacy” in some ways. The expression “technical intentionality” really can establish a kinship with Husserl, and it really does say some things beyond what the more general theory of technical “bias” says. Technology is not neutral—this is already a basic consensus in philosophy of technology—but usually people only say that technical objects have ethical tendencies, political tendencies, and so on. But if one says they have “intentionality,” then what exactly does that mean?
In the briefest formulation, “intentionality” says that consciousness is always directed toward some object. This is not wrong, but interpreters sometimes place the emphasis of the sentence on the word “object.” Yet if so, why not simply say that consciousness has an “object-like” character? There may be many ways to explain intentionality, and many disputes about it, but in any case it certainly says more than mere “objectivity.”
In Brentano and early Husserl, “intentionality” indeed contains a fairly strong sense of “objectness.” In later phenomenological development, especially in Heidegger, this “object” is gradually dissolved, and especially objectified, reified objects are explicitly excluded. Yet even in early Husserl’s account, although he posits a certain consciousness-object that tends toward objectification, the focus of the doctrine of intentionality is still not this “object,” but the structure between conscious activity and the object of consciousness; the emphasis is on “directedness” and “aboutness.”
Phenomenology continues the tradition of German classical philosophy. Kant made an epistemological “revolution”: he no longer started from ready-made objects, nor from a pure subject, but from the “forms of cognition” between subject and object. But Kant’s “forms of cognition” remain extremely thin—more precisely, they are time and space; yet his so-called time and space are basically still Cartesian. Husserl’s doctrine of intentionality is precisely a filling-out of Kant. The “mediation” that makes the presentation of objects possible is no longer just the emptiest, most abstract Cartesian mathematical and geometrical space-time. On the contrary, the reason Cartesian space-time is possible itself has a more originary, yet also richer, basis—namely, what the doctrine of intentionality reveals. “Consciousness” is not a point, not an insulator. Consciousness itself already contains a structure that opens outward and allows the external world to present itself. The study of this internal structure of conscious activity is phenomenology. From Husserl’s “internal time-consciousness” to Merleau-Ponty’s bodily space, the Cartesian space-time of Kantian philosophy was thoroughly liquidated.
Like Kant, phenomenology does not seek truth in ready-made objects, nor within a pure subject, but in the manner of presentation of objects, at the very moment when subject and object have not yet been separated. The doctrine of intentionality reveals that revolving space between subject and object, and discovers that this “presentation” itself contains a certain structure, and that this structure is no longer the vague and abstract time-space, but rich and subtle. Every thing has its own unique mode of presentation. Phenomenology does not seek to discover a universally applicable formula to explain all phenomena; rather, it discovers a point of entry—not to analyze the structure of objects, nor to analyze the structure of the soul, but to analyze the structure of intentionality.
So how does one analyze the structure of intentionality? Husserl offered some tentative approaches, such as “epoché,” suspending the object and turning instead to its mode of appearing.
How exactly does this “turning instead” turn? How is such a reversal possible? In Husserl, phenomenology is basically still an “introspective” activity within consciousness. But since conscious activity is always directed toward objects, how can consciousness bypass the object and turn back to reflect on the structure of conscious activity itself?
Theoretically, there are only two possible paths: one is to acknowledge that some kind of “non-objective thinking” is possible; the other is to acknowledge that conscious structures may in some way become objectified, externalized, or solidified, and thus also become a direction toward which consciousness can be directed.
Choosing the first path and insisting on the mode of consciousness as introspection leads to some sense of religious experience or meditative realization—such as James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, and the authentic state of confronting “nothingness” revealed by Heidegger in Being and Time. These are all such approaches. These reflections are indeed a kind of non-objective thinking, but the farther this path goes, the more private, mysterious, obscure, and incommunicable it becomes.
This path is the right one. Not to mention religious experience, at least the experience of facing death is something every person can and should bear. And when one experiences death, one is also reflecting on the self in the most fundamental way. But such reflection is not the whole of it after all. Our understanding of a more subtle and richer lifeworld does not arise only through mystical experience; yet these trivial matters, like matters of life and death, also contain corresponding truths. How, then, is phenomenological reflection on these concrete situations possible?
The second path has two branches. One is the natural-scientific branch: that is, through objectifying research such as psychology, physiology, neuroscience, and the like, to dissect the structure of consciousness. Phenomenology need not hastily reject these scientific methods. Certain mechanisms of consciousness discovered by neuroscience really may help us understand our own conscious activity, just as a photograph can indeed help us recognize a person, even if the face presented there is very flattened and simplified. The other branch is that of philosophy of technology.
I will not elaborate here on the related discussions of McLuhan and Stiegler. I will only speak of the place of “intentionality” within them.
Intentionality emphasizes that conscious activity is not something that occurs inside an isolated insulator; rather, it itself has the characteristic of “extension,” extending outward toward external things in some way, through some structure.
And this extension has its own “pattern.” For each different kind of thing, people have different intentional modes. We attend to the taste of food, the heft of a hammer, the appearance of clothing… “Thinking of hamburgers” and “thinking of women” are completely different. The former is generally an intention of “eating,” while the latter is generally an intention of “sleeping.” To be conscious of something does not mean that the thing appears in our minds like a form in geometric space; it always means that something is intended by us in its specific way.
And the proper ways of intending things are obviously not formed a priori inside our brains; rather, they are formed through trial and learning, through long-term dealings with the external world.
Unlike Kant’s a priori forms, “intentional structures” are not fixed a priori, but are more often set up afterward by acquired experience (a large part of which are “default configurations” that could not originally be chosen, but can later be modified).
So how is “learning” possible? That brings us back to the issue I have been discussing all along: externalization and internalization, technology as “third memory,” and so on; I will not repeat myself.
Technology is precisely the externalization and solidification of intentional structure. It is this externally extended existence that makes internalization, that is, learning, possible. And it is also because human consciousness has always possessed an inherent intentional character—namely, the character of extending outward—that the creation and manufacture of technology become possible. The intention of “hammering” guides the making of the “hammer,” while the ready-made existence of the “hammer” in turn strengthens and revises people’s intention regarding “hammering.”
In this way, analyzing technical artifacts can become a study of the structure of consciousness, because they are nothing more than the extension and solidification of conscious structure.
Of course, treating technical artifacts as ready-made objects for study is still not enough. This is like the brain’s nerves also being something that can be treated as ready-made objects for study. The advantage of “technical intentionality” does not lie in its ready-made character, but in its public character. We can carry out reflective activity in a more outward, visible, and open way. “Non-objective thinking” sounds mysterious, but “non-objective use” is much easier to grasp. I have vulgarized Husserl’s “epoché” into an epoché of “media content.” For example, if I want to inspect the meaning of the medium of a microphone, I do so by using operations like “hello, hello, hello” to suspend the sound content presented through the microphone. We are not attending to the physical structure of the microphone, nor to the specific content of the speech; rather, we attend to the changes that occur to the speech content after it passes through the microphone, and the structure of this change is the microphone’s “intentional structure” — “amplifying sound.” That is to say, when I try to speak through a microphone, my intention is to amplify my own voice. And this intention is an extension of the way we amplify sound through the throat, an extension of the conscious activity of “wanting to speak loudly.” But these extensions in turn open up new meanings, so the intention “to get hold of a microphone” is after all not exactly the same as “wanting to speak loudly.” By analyzing and comparing different situations in which one does or does not use a microphone, we can naturally help ourselves reflect on the various corresponding capacities and desires of human beings, and on the interactive relationships between people and between people and the world, and so on.
Technical intentionality and “brain intentionality” are not two separate things. On the one hand, they are continuous: the former is an extension of the latter. On the other hand, they are symmetrical: the two are mutually presupposed and mutually transform one another.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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