This is a supplement to the previous article. I had originally wanted to make “technical intentionality” the core concept of this piece, but in the end I backed away from it, knowing the difficulty. Still, because the idea had been brewing for so long, I always wanted to say a few words 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 also wrote about it in my notes from that year:
Professor Wu spoke about “the intentional structure in technology,” while Professor Jin disagreed with such a use of the term. He believed that only human beings have intentionality, and that a knife cannot “fly up by itself and cut people”; therefore, 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 offer some defense of Professor Wu. Professor Jin’s line of thought seems not yet to have escaped a human-centered bias, and once we take the human and technology as co-constitutive, the status of “man” can no longer retain such a natural superiority. Here, a knife indeed cannot “fly up by itself” and cut people, but a person, if he has no knife or any tool that can cut, likewise cannot “by himself” cut people. A person needs the aid of some knife in order to “cut,” and likewise a knife needs the aid of some person in order to “cut”; so if “the knife itself” has no intentionality of cutting, by what right does “the person himself” have one? In fact, this “intentional structure” of “cutting” is jointly constituted by human and knife. Put simply, the “human” has the capacity for “intention,” while the “knife” is the provider of “structure.” Without technology, human intention can only be entirely empty; it is technology, or rather the existence of media, that makes a directed intentional structure possible. If no human provides the consciousness of “cutting,” then of course the knife cannot “cut” on its own; but if no knife provides the structure (actuality, possibility) of “cutting,” then human beings will not spontaneously generate the consciousness of “cutting” either. What is called “intentional structure” precisely points to the mutually constitutive relation between human and technology. In popular terms, “man” possesses the capacity for “intention,” while “knife” is the provider of “structure.” As for human free will, that is another matter altogether.
The development of artificial intelligence has made “the knife flying up to cut people” no longer a fantasy. In fact, there are already AI-controlled surgical knives, and naturally they can fly up and cut people without any trouble. Of course, those who insist on “human dignity” will never admit that a knife can be placed on the same level as a human being. Perhaps even when robots end up herding or slaughtering human beings in reverse, there will still be many philosophy professors hiding in ivory towers who insist that robots are not human, no matter how many things they can do—if they are not human, then they are not human… I really don’t know what the point of such questions is. 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 people, does that count as having intentionality?
The concept of “intentionality” was mainly emphasized by Brentano and Husserl, proposed as a feature of psychic phenomena or conscious activity, and it became one of the key terms of phenomenology. Later, the so-called post-phenomenologists Ihde and Verbeek developed the concept of “technical intentionality.”
At the time, I felt that the concept of “technical intentionality” was indeed extremely important, and in a certain sense one might even say that whether this concept is valid concerns whether the whole so-called “phenomenological philosophy of technology” is valid.
At that time, Professor Wu also seemed to very much appreciate Ihde’s route in the phenomenology of technology. But in recent years, as we in the Wu school have come to understand Ihde and others more deeply, especially through the work of classmate Wu Ningning, we have become much more skeptical and wary of Ihde’s approach. Ihde has many schematic and ready-made interpretations of phenomenology. Although these simplifications are not necessarily all unusable, we must be much more discriminating.
My attitude toward the concept of “technical intentionality” has also changed somewhat. First, I still think this concept can be defended, but whether one must insist on using it is no longer something I feel so certain about.
After all, the word “intentionality” itself is a term from Husserl. 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 this word.
The characteristic of phenomenology in its use of concepts is that it is “alive”; concepts themselves are only “formal guidance,” and it is never worthwhile to camp out on a single concept. Not to mention the movement from Husserl to Heidegger to Merleau-Ponty, even within Heidegger alone, from his early period to his later period, there are very few concepts that are always held onto. Whether or not to use a certain concept is more of a strategic question. Every concept has its power of revelation, and also its misleading side; the key lies in balancing them.
The so-called concept of technical intentionality in “post-phenomenology” certainly makes sense, but one obvious meaning of it is nothing other than what McLuhan expressed as “the medium is the message,” or what Innis expressed as the medium’s “bias.” The claim that the medium is the message certainly has strong revelatory power, and the concept of “bias” is not bad either; it includes the sense of “prejudice” as it applies to human beings, but its anthropomorphism is not as strong as “intentionality.”
The advantage of “intentionality” is that it hints at the continuity between philosophy of technology and the phenomenological tradition. “Technical intentionality” is indeed a further extension of Husserl’s doctrine of intentionality. But its drawback is that it easily causes discussion to fall into a struggle over nomenclature. Originally, you used the word intentionality precisely to establish a connection with Husserl, so when others probe the question of proper designation, that is entirely to be expected. But being trapped in questions of nomenclature is unfavorable to us.
Still, even if I do not necessarily think that insisting on the term “technical intentionality” is a good strategy, I am still willing to defend its “designation.” The term “technical intentionality” indeed can claim kinship with Husserl, and it also does in fact say something more than the usual theory of technological “bias.” Technology is not neutral—this is already a basic consensus in philosophy of technology. But usually one only says that technological artifacts have ethical tendencies, political tendencies, and so on. But if one says they have “intentions,” then what exactly does that mean?
In the briefest formulation, “intentionality” means that human consciousness is always directed toward some object. This is not wrong, but interpreters sometimes place the emphasis of this sentence on the word “object”; if so, why not simply say that consciousness has the feature of “objecthood”? There may be many ways of explaining intentionality, and many disputes about it, but in any case it surely says more than “objecthood” does.
In Brentano and in Husserl’s early formulations, “intentionality” indeed contains a relatively strong implication of “objecthood.” In later phenomenological development, especially in Heidegger, this “object” is gradually dissolved, and especially the object as ready-made and reified is explicitly excluded. Yet even in early Husserl, although he posits a certain consciousness-object that tends toward ready-made status, the emphasis of the doctrine of intentionality is still not on this “object,” but on the structure between conscious activity and its object—on the direction toward, the being-about.
Phenomenology continues the tradition of German classical philosophy. Kant made an epistemological “revolution”: he no longer starts from a ready-made object, nor from a pure subject, but from the “forms of cognition” between subject and object. But Kant’s “forms of cognition” are always very thin—concretely speaking, they are time and space, though his so-called time and space remain basically Cartesian. Husserl’s doctrine of intentionality is precisely a concretization of Kant. The “mediations” of cognition that make the presentation of an object possible are no longer merely the empty and abstract Cartesian mathematical and geometrical space-time; on the contrary, the reason Cartesian space-time is possible at all rests on a more originary yet also richer foundation, 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 enables the external world to appear. The study of the inner structure of this conscious activity is phenomenology. From Husserl’s “internal time-consciousness” to Merleau-Ponty’s bodily space, the Cartesian space-time in Kantian philosophy is thoroughly liquidated.
Phenomenology, like Kant, does not seek truth within ready-made objects, nor within a pure subject, but in the mode in which objects are presented, 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, discovering that presentation itself contains a certain structure, and this structure is no longer a broad and abstract time-space, but something rich and subtle. Every thing has its own unique mode of presentation. Phenomenology is not trying to discover a universally applicable formula that explains all phenomena; rather, it has discovered a way in— 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 gave some tentative approaches, for example “epoché,” bracketing the object and turning instead to attend to the way it appears.
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 speaking, there are only two possible paths: one is to admit that a certain kind of “non-objective thinking” is possible; the other is to admit that the structure of consciousness may, in some way, become objectified, externalized, or solidified, and thus also become something toward which consciousness can be directed.
Choosing the first path and insisting on the method of inner consciousness leads to something like religious experience or meditative embodiment. James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience, as well as the authentic state of confronting “nothingness” revealed by Heidegger in Being and Time, are all of this sort. These reflections are indeed a kind of non-objective thinking, but the further one goes down this path, the more private, mysterious, obscure, and difficult to articulate it becomes.
This path is the right one. Setting aside religious experience, at least the experience of facing death is something everyone can and should take on; and in experiencing death, one is also reflecting on the self at its most fundamental level. But such reflection is by no means the whole of it. Our understanding of the more subtle and rich lifeworld does not come only through mystical experience, yet these trivial matters, just like the great matters of life and death, also contain their own truths. How, then, is phenomenological reflection on these concrete situations possible?
The second path has two branches. One is the natural-scientific path: using objectifying research in psychology, physiology, neuroscience, and so on to dissect the structure of consciousness. Phenomenology need not rush to reject these scientific methods. Certain mechanisms of consciousness discovered by neuroscience may indeed 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 highly flattened and simplified. The other branch is the philosophy of technology.
I won’t go into the relevant discussions by McLuhan and Stiegler here; I will only talk about the place of “intentionality” within them.
Intentionality emphasizes that conscious activity is not something that takes place inside an isolated insulator. 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 different things, people have different modes of intention. We attend to the taste of food, the weight of a hammer, the shape of clothing… “Thinking of hamburgers” and “thinking of women” are completely different. The former is generally an intention of “eating,” the latter generally an intention of “sleeping.” To be conscious of something does not mean that the thing appears in our mind 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 within our brains; rather, they are formed through trial and learning, through long-term dealings with the external world.
Unlike Kantian a priori forms, “intentional structures” are not fixed a priori, but are more often configured a posteriori (with a large part of them being “default settings” that cannot initially be chosen but can later be revised).
So how is “learning” possible? This brings us back to the problem I have been discussing all along: externalization and internalization, technology as “tertiary retention,” and so on, which I will not repeat here.
Technology is precisely the externalization and solidification of intentional structure. It is the existence of this external extension that makes internalization, that is, learning, possible. And it is precisely because human consciousness has always possessed an inherent intentional character—namely, the character of reaching outward—that the creation and fabrication 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 intentions regarding “hammering.”
In this way, analyzing technological artifacts may become a study of the structure of consciousness, because they are nothing other than the extension and solidification of that structure.
Of course, treating technological artifacts as ready-made objects for study is still not enough; that is like treating the brain’s nerves as ready-made objects for study. The advantage of “technical intentionality” lies not in its ready-made status, but in its public character. We can carry out reflective activity in a more explicit, visible, and public way. “Non-objective thinking” sounds mysterious, but “non-objective use” is much easier to grasp. I have trivialized Husserl’s “bracketing,” turning it into a bracketing of “media content.” For example, if I want to examine the meaning of the medium of a microphone, I carry out operations like “hello, hello, hello,” thereby emptying out the sound content presented through the microphone. We are not paying attention to the microphone’s physical structure, nor to the specific content of what is being said; rather, we are paying attention to the changes that occur in the content of speech once it has passed through the microphone, and the structure of that 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 the voice 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 of “wanting 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 a microphone is or is not used, we can naturally help ourselves reflect on the various corresponding capacities and desires of human beings, as well as the patterns of interaction among people and between people and the world.
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 transformed.
Translated from the Chinese original with AI assistance. The original text is authoritative.
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