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Ibn Sn and Husserl on Intention and IntentionalityAuthor(s):
Marina Paola Banchetti-RobinoSource: Philosophy East and West, Vol.
54, No. 1 (Jan., 2004), pp. 71-82Published by: University of
Hawai'i PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1399863
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IBN SINA AND HUSSERL ON INTENTION AND INTENTIONALITY
Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino Department of Philosophy, Florida
Atlantic University
The concepts of intention and intentionality have enjoyed a long
history within Western philosophy. They were particularly important
notions in the Christian, Jew- ish, and Islamic philosophical
traditions of the Middle Ages and regained philo- sophical
importance in the twentieth century, particularly in the writings
of Edmund Husserl. This essay proposes to confront medieval
philosophy with contemporary phenomenology by conducting a
comparative study of the concepts of intention and intentionality
as they appear in the philosophical works of the Islamic
philosopher and physician Ibn STna (latinized as Avicenna) and the
phenomenological philoso- pher and mathematician Edmund
Husserl.
There are profound differences between Ibn STna's and Husserl's
accounts of intention and intentionality, and it is particularly
interesting to examine the in- fluences and the specific
philosophical concerns that helped to shape each phi- losopher's
unique conception of intentions and intentional processes and of
in- tentionality's relation to consciousness. To this end, I shall
first examine Ibn STna's naturalistic conception of intention and
how it was, in many ways, influenced by the tradition of the
Baghdad school of philosopher-physicians and their understanding of
the 'internal senses'. After this I shall examine Husserl's
anti-naturalistic stance regarding intention and intentionality and
how this stance was both influenced by and, in part, a response to
Franz Brentano's psychologistic account of 'intentional
in-existence'. Lastly, I shall argue that, in their approach to the
concept of intentional meanings and of intentionality, Ibn Sina and
Husserl were, in many ways, strongly influenced by the professional
culture to which each belonged, that of the physician and the
mathematician, respectively. After this I shall argue for the
superiority of the Husserlian transcendentalist view over the
Avicennian naturalistic view.
Ibn STna's Account of Intention and Intentionality
Although many philosophers today, even those who do not consider
themselves phenomenologists, are somewhat familiar with Husserl's
theory of intentionality, they are less familiar with Ibn STna's
understanding of the concept of intention, unless, of course, they
are medievalists or have a certain degree of competence in medieval
philosophy. Therefore, I shall begin by examining the concept of
intention as it appears in the work of Ibn STna, particularly in
his psychology and his meta- physics, as found in the Kitab
al-Najat and the Kitab al-Shiff'.
The theory of intention elaborated by Ibn STna in his accounts
of psychology,
Philosophy East & West Volume 54, Number 1 January 2004
71-82 71 ? 2004 by University of Hawai'i Press
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epistemology, and metaphysics was transmitted to Scholastic
philosophy through the work of Thomas Aquinas. In Ibn Sina's
discussion of Being and substance,
Being is the proper and primary object of metaphysics.... Being
per se is substance; within this [Ibn STna] distinguishes separate
and material forms and matter, which is a substance of inferior
order.
... [Ibn SiTn] reaches the conclusion that one thing can
legitimately exist in the spirit and be missing from external
objects; he calls this type of existence intentional being [or
intentional existence].... In his theory of knowledge, [Ibn STnd]
uses [the concept of intention] to explain the relation between
object and subject. (Emphasis mine)' In chapter 3 of the Najdt,
titled "Internal Sense," we read the following account
of intention: There are some faculties of internal perception
which perceive the form of the sensed things, and others which
perceive the 'intention' thereof. Some faculties, again, can both
perceive and act while others only perceive and do not act. Some
possess primary per- ception, others secondary perception. The
distinction between the perception of the form and that of the
intention is that the form is what is perceived both by the inner
soul and the external sense; but the external sense perceives it
first and then transmits it to the soul, as for example, when the
sheep perceives the form of the wolf, i.e., its shape, form, and
colour. This form is certainly perceived by the inner soul of the
sheep, but it is first per- ceived by its external sense. As for
the intention, it is a thing which the soul perceives from the
sensed object without its previously having been perceived by the
external sense, just as the sheep perceives the intention of harm
in the wolf, which causes it to fear the wolf and to flee from it,
without harm having been perceived at all by the external sense.
Now, what is first perceived by the sense and then by the internal
faculties is the form, while what only the internal faculties
perceive without the external sense is the in- tention.2
Why does the sheep, through its internal sense, perceive
hostility in the wolf? According to one reading of this text, the
intention in itself is not perceived by the external senses, and
one cannot point to anything specifically perceived by the ex-
ternal senses that displays the intention. There is, however,
something about the form (sura) that is perceived by the external
senses and which, in turn, leads to the perception of intention by
the internal senses:
Sensible forms are ... corporeal qualities that affect the
sensory organs in such a way that they are received by virtue of
their similitude. This is the reason for which they are received
first by the external senses and are then transmitted to the
internal senses. But the 'meanings' that these objects signify are
not such corporeal qualities but, rather, qualities or values that
are latent in the sensible forms, such as the quality of being
agreeable or disagreeable, good or bad, sympathetic or
non-sympathetic, etc.... For example, the animal, seeing a yellow
liquid that is honey, judges that it is sweet and proceeds to taste
it. The sweetness that is seized by this judgment is not sensible,
al- though this quality in itself is sensible, because it has not
yet actually been tasted by the animal.... The sheep, perceiving
the figure, the howls and the scent of a wolf, judges that he is
ferocious and dangerous, and runs away from it immediately. It is
not merely that it seizes the living object by simply accepting
certain of its vital qualities, but also [that it seizes the
object] by the attribution of these qualities to the object.3
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According to Ibn STna, the faculty of estimation is responsible
for the perception of intentions and, thus, for intentionality.
This faculty is part of Ibn Sina's rather complex scheme of the
'internal senses' that he inherited, in part, from the Baghdad
school of philosopher-physicians. According to this scheme, there
are two types of sensible objects that can be perceived by the
internal senses, and there are two types of faculties, within the
internal senses, that perceive these sensible objects. The two
types of faculties of internal sense are the receptive faculty and
the retentive faculty. Ibn Sina explains that these two faculties
are distinct from the fact that reception requires a malleable
substrate since, when receiving a form, a change must take place in
the substrate. On the other hand, retention requires a stable
substrate since retaining a form requires a changeless
substrate.
The two types of sensible objects are sensible forms and
intentions. We must understand that, in this context, 'sensible'
does not mean 'sensuous', that is, per- ceivable by the external
senses, but merely perceivable by the internal senses. This is why
Ibn Sina can refer to intentions as 'sensible objects' even though,
as established in the Najat, intentions are never perceived or
perceivable by the external senses. Intentions, according to Ibn
STna, are what sensible form 'means' or 'signifies' to the
percipient subject. Thus, to return to the example used by Ibn
STnd, the sensible form of the wolf 'signifies' hostility to the
sheep. Although the sheep does not literally 'see' hostility in the
wolf's eyes, the sensible form of the expression in the wolf's eyes
'means', to the sheep, that the wolf is hostile. The ferociousness
of the wolf is latent in its appearance and comportment. However,
because an intention is not itself a sensuous quality of the
object, although it may be conveyed to the percipient through a
sensory faculty, it does not affect any sense organ at the time
during which the judgment is being made.
In the scheme of internal senses, there is a faculty of the
receptive type and a faculty of the retentive type that handle each
type of sensible object. Common sense is the faculty that receives
(or perceives) sensible forms, whereas the formative (or retentive)
imagination is the faculty that retains sensible forms. The
estimative faculty (wahm) is the faculty that receives (or
perceives) intentions, whereas the memorative faculty retains
intentions. The proper objects of the estimative faculty are, then,
ma'nan or intentions. In nonhuman animals, the estimative faculty
is somewhat limited. They can, as the example of the sheep
illustrates, perceive non-sensual aspects of the environment "that
exceed the perceptual capacities of the [external] senses and the
imagination."4 However, in human animals, the estimative faculty
also has cognitive functions that it does not have in nonhuman
animals. Thus, in human animals the estimative faculty and the
intellective faculty are co-present.5
Unlike Alexander of Aphrodisias and Plotinus, who understood the
idea of per- ception non-physiologically, Ibn Sina rematerializes
perception, and, in doing this, he also indirectly materializes his
account of intention. As has already been estab- lished above, for
Ibn STnma intentions are closely connected to sense perceptions be-
cause they are dependent on them and, for him, sense perception
contains a clearly physiological and materialistic element:
"although the estimative faculty has non- sensible intentions as
its proper objects, it only possesses those intentions when
they
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are conjoined with particular sensible forms represented in the
imagination, thereby compelling estimation to 'impede the existence
of things which cannot be imagined and are not imprinted in [the
imagination], and to refuse to assent to them.'"'6 As we have seen
above, however, there is nothing in the imagination that is not
first received through the perception of sensible forms.
Now, perception, for Ibn STna, occurs when common sense receives
sensible forms, that is, form without matter. This account of
perception is directly inherited from Aristotle, for whom the
reception of form without matter was interpreted by the Scholastics
as 'intentional in-existence'. Once the form without matter has
been received by common sense, the imaginative faculty retains
these sensible forms. Thus, the estimative faculty receives
intentions on the basis of the sensible forms, or form without
matter, that are received by common sense and that are retained by
the imagination. This, then, establishes the dependence of the
faculty of estimation, or of intentionality, on sense perception.
"[F]or all five senses, the reception of form without matter is
interpreted as making the perceiver become like the form of the
thing perceived.... Although the form is received stripped of its
original matter, the abstraction from matter in sense-perception is
not so complete as in the estimative faculty or in the intellect."7
Therefore, since it can be shown that, for Ibn STna, there is a
physiological element to the reception and retention of the
sensible forms of external objects, one would have to conclude that
intentionality has, ultimately, physiological origins.
At this point, I would like to examine the cultural influences
that helped shape Ibn STna's account of perception, cognition, and
intentionality. However, rather than focus on ethnic culture, I
shall focus on the professional culture that helped to shape Ibn
Sina's understanding of these concepts. Although there are
Neoplatonic influ- ences in Ibn STna's conception of the intellect,
his account of other mental faculties, such as perception, is not
Neoplatonic. However, one should not extract from this that Ibn
STna's account of perception is entirely Aristotelian.
Notwithstanding the fact that his account of perception was, in
some ways, inherited from Aristotle and the Peripatetic
philosophical tradition, the evidence suggests that Ibn STna's
naturalistic, psychologistic, and quasi-physiological account of
perception and other mental faculties was, in many ways, influenced
by his own training as a physician and by his attempt to respond to
and mediate between the physicians' account of mental faculties and
the philosophers' account.
Greatly influential in Ibn STna's medical training and in his
understanding of the mental faculties, especially that of
perception, was the Baghdad school of philosopher-physicians. This
medical circle represented the 'afterlife' of the Baghdad
Peripatetics, and they were "a constant feature of the intellectual
life of medieval Islam."8 They were not only prominent physicians
but also translators and students of the work of Aristotle, Galen,
and Hippocrates, and it is out of this cultural tradition of the
philosopher-physician that Ibn STna emerged.
The physicians' account of the mental faculties was much more
physiological than the account to be found in the Aristotelian
tradition. We find for example, in Ibn Luka, the following purely
physiological conception of the spirit. "The spirit ...
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is a subtle substance that emanates throughout the body. Arising
from the heart, it directs itself in the arteries and gives birth
to life, to breath, and to arterial pulsation and, arising from the
brain, it passes through the nerves and produces sensation and
movement."' Ibn Laka views the spirit as an intermediary between
the body and the soul. It is through the spirit that the soul
communicates life and sensation to the body. Thus, although he does
not endorse a materialist conception of the soul, Ibn LOka does
endorse a materialist conception of the spirit as the intermediary
between soul and body.10 One could speculate that Ibn LOik might be
trying to avoid the obvious philosophical and physical problems
associated with the notion of interac- tion between a material and
an immaterial substance. The problem, however, is not successfully
avoided by adding a third and material substance as an
intermediary, since this material substance called 'spirit' must
also interact with the immaterial soul, thereby resurrecting the
problem of interaction.
According to the physicians of the Baghdad school,
the faculties of the soul are regarded only with reference to
the bodily organs in which they reside and not with reference to
the variety of function which they perform, for physicians ...
concern themselves with faculties of the soul only in so far as a
hindrance in the functioning can be traced to an injury in the
bodily organs in which they are located. Consequently, if two
functionally different faculties of the soul reside in one bodily
organ, then physicians regard it as one faculty, inasmuch as any
injury in that organ will affect the two faculties alike."1
Thus, the physicians made no distinction, for example, between
the receptive and the retentive types of faculty of internal sense.
Ibn Sina seems to want to balance the account given by the medical
circle and that given by the philosophers, such as al-Kindi and
al-Farabi. It is clear that in his scheme of faculties of the
internal senses Ibn Sina tries to break away from the strict
physiological account of the Baghdad school of
philosopher-physicians. He does this by considering the receptive
faculties as distinct from the retentive faculties by focusing on
their functional differences. He appeals to syllogistic logic to
make his argument. Only a malleable substrate can acquire the
nonmaterial sensible form that is received in perception. Only a
stable substrate can retain the form after it has been acquired. A
substrate cannot be both malleable and stable. Therefore, the
receptive faculty and the retentive faculty must be distinct in
kind, one malleable and the other stable. QED. Furthermore, his ac-
count of intentions is that they are 'meanings' or
'significations', abstract and non- sensory aspects of the external
environment that, although they accompany sense perception, are not
themselves perceived by the external senses.
However, there is also evidence in several of Ibn Sina's
writings, especially in his medical magnum opus, the Canon, but
also in ShifX' and Kafet, that he does not completely break away
from the physician's account. In these works, Ibn STna places wahm,
or the estimative or intentional faculty, in a specific bodily
location, at the end of the middle hollow of the brain.12 Thus, to
follow the reasoning of the medical circle, any injury to this part
of the bodily organ would affect the animal's ability to receive
intentions. Therefore, a sheep whose middle hollow of the brain had
been
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somehow injured to the point of affecting the estimative
faculty, but without any in- jury to any other part of the brain,
would conceivably be able to perceive the wolf but would be unable
to detect hostility in the animal. This would then lead to the
conclusion, unacceptable to someone like Edmund Husserl, that there
could be an almost perfectly functioning consciousness without
intentions or intentionality.
Husserl's Account of Intention and Intentionality
Husserl's doctrine of intentionality is a highly sophisticated
and developed version of the frequently held epistemological
position that "the human mind makes substantial contributions to
the specific structure of what appears before it, so that
experience is construed to be a complex of data given externally
and organizational princi- ples supplied internally."13 Once one
has suspended all ontological commitments, assumptions, and
presuppositions and once contingencies are bracketed, the struc-
ture of consciousness is revealed in its essence as being
intentional. Husserl tells us that all consciousness is necessarily
actionally 'directed' toward an 'object'. In other words, all
consciousness is necessarily consciousness of something. It is this
pecu- liarity of mental processes that is known as
intentionality.
Husserl also refers to intentionality as 'egological
constitution' for the reason that the intentional act is one in
which subjective consciousness synthesizes the sensu- ous data that
is given to it and bestows sense or meaning upon it. The act
through which the ego bestows meaning upon its object is called the
noetic act, and the meaningful object or 'meaning' that is
constituted through this act is called a noema. Thus, for Husserl,
the intentional object and the noema are one and the same. In Ideas
I, for example, Husserl tells us:
Like perception, every intentive mental process-just this makes
up the fundamental part of intentionality-has its "intentional
Object," i.e., its objective sense. Or, in some other words: to
have sense or "to intend to" something [etwas "im Sinne zu haben"],
is the fundamental characteristic of all consciousness which,
therefore, is not just any mental living [Erlebnis] whatever, but
is rather a (mental living> having sense, which is "noetic."
(Emphasis in original)14
This actional Ego-advertence is not to be found in every mental
event; that is, not every mental event is directed or intentional.
'Pain', for example, is a mental event that is not itself
intentional. But, every mental process can, within itself, include
intentionality. Husserl calls those mental events that are not
intentional appercep- tions, whereas those mental events that are
intentional are called inner or outer perceptions. Thus,
apperceptions are states, whereas perception and all actionally
directed mental events are not states but mobile activities. The
essential dynamic of an intentional event is that it projects
itself toward something, its intended object. Although Husserl
distinguishes between apperception and perception, he claims that
all mental processes, even those which are not themselves
intentive, are ultimately born in and borne by intentionality. This
is due to the fact that Ego unification itself occurs through an
intentional act, the most fundamental of all intentional acts,
for
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without it there would be no unified stream of consciousness.
Meaning must, then, be bestowed upon the Ego before meaning can be
bestowed upon the world of experience. Thus, an apperception like
'pain', although it is not itself a mental event characterized by
intentionality, is experienced by an Ego that is unified and is,
therefore, the product of an intentional act.
Consciousness, for Husserl, is thus immersed in intentionality.
Consciousness is intentionality. For there to be mental events,
there must be an Ego serving as the subject of these mental events,
and, in order for there to be an Ego, there must an intentional,
constitutive act capable of synthesizing and unifying the stream of
con- sciousness. Thus, it is absurd to speak of any conscious state
or mental event as being, in no manner whatsoever, founded on
intentional acts, for the empirical or psychological self is itself
the product of the transcendental Ego's act of constitutive
synthesis.
Following Husserl, we can draw the following conclusions.
Because we are not speaking of the empirical Ego but of the
transcendental Ego, and because we have bracketed all ontological
commitments to or assumptions about a material world external to
the Ego, we realize that intentionality cannot be reduced to brain
states or located in a particular brain or part of the brain.
Intentionality does not presup- pose the existence of a physical,
material brain. Intentionality only presupposes consciousness, and
consciousness presupposes intentionality. The two are, in es-
sence, one and the same. For as long as there is consciousness,
there is intention- ality. And, when there is no longer
intentionality, there is no longer consciousness. Although we
understand that, as a matter of fact, only beings with a nervous
system and a brain have consciousness, the essential characteristic
of consciousness, that is, intentionality, is not reducible to the
brain itself or to any particular part of the brain. Thus, no
damage can be done to the brain that could lead to non-intentional
con- scious states. A non-intentional conscious state, for Husserl,
is a contradiction in terms. The only possible damage to the brain
that could destroy intentionality is damage that destroys
consciousness altogether.
It is clear that Husserl's concept of intentionality was not
born in a void but was inherited, rather, from the long tradition
that preceded him. The tradition through which the concept of
intentionality was transmitted from Aristotle to the twentieth
century is a long and complex one. Ibn STnd is but one of the many
philosophers through which this concept passed from its origins in
Aristotelian psychology through Scholasticism on its way to
contemporary philosophy. It is not the purpose of this essay to
trace this long history, which has already been successfully
addressed by other authors.15 Suffice it to say that, after the
Scholastic period in medieval phi- losophy, the concept of
intentionality existed in semi-obscurity until 1874 when Franz
Brentano, in his Psychologie vom empirischen Standpunkt,
"[re]introduced into the philosophy of mind the seminal idea of an
intentional object."''16 Brentano tell us:
Every mental phenomenon is characterized by what the Scholastics
of the Middle Ages called the intentional (or mental) inexistence
of an object, and what we might call,
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though not wholly unambiguously, reference to a content,
direction toward an object (which is not to be understood here as
meaning a thing), or immanent objectivity. Every mental phenomenon
includes something as object within itself although they do not all
do so in the same way. In presentation something is presented, in
judgement something is affirmed or denied, in love loved, in hate
hated, in desire desired and so on. This intentional in-existence
is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical
phenomenon exhibits anything like it. We can, therefore, define
mental phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which
contain an object intentionally within themselves.'7
In Brentano, the definition of intentional inexistence remains
virtually un- changed from the definition found in the Scholastics.
According to Brentano, the feature that distinguishes mental
phenomena from physical phenomena is that they are directed toward
objects that have intentional inexistence.18 It is this aspect of
Brentano's theory that greatly influenced Husserl, for Husserl also
concludes that mental events and consciousness as a whole are
essentially distinguished by their intentional character, that is,
their directedness toward intentional objects.
The concept of an intentional object that we find in Brentano's
work, however, is very different from that to be found in Husserl.
After inheriting the concept of intentionality from Brentano,
Husserl clearly broke away from Brentano's account. Although
Brentano's account is not naturalistic in the same way as Ibn
STna's, Bren- tano's conception of intentional inexistence is a
theory about the nature of the psy- chological Ego, that is, of
empirical consciousness and, therefore, remains psycho- logistic
and naturalistic. Husserl, as a mathematician who embraces the
Bolzanian requirement for a pure logic, is, on the other hand,
concerned with developing an account of consciousness and
intentionality that is nonpsychologistic, nonnatural- istic, and
non-reductionistic. Only such a nonnaturalistic account could,
according to Husserl, provide us with a phenomenology that could
serve as the truly scientific foundation for logic, mathematics,
and the empirical sciences. Logic, as Husserl claims, is not
concerned with the vague laws of empirical psychology but with pre-
cise and universal laws.19 Understanding that these laws are not
merely descriptive and contingent features of the empirical world
but are, rather, theoretical laws holding for the domain of ideal
meanings, Husserl seeks to overcome the naturalism, empiricism, and
reductionism that, he believes, were responsible for the emergence
of logical psychologism. According to logical psychologism, there
is nothing a priori, objective, or necessary about logic,
mathematics, and meanings. To embrace logical psychologism is to
embrace a view of logical and mathematical laws as contingently
true descriptions of how empirical subjects happen to think.
Psychological facts serve as the foundation of logical laws.
Logical psychologism, according to Husserl, inevitably leads to
relativism and skepticism, and logical psychologism emerges from
naturalism. "Naturalism, in the sense in which Husserl understands
it, seems ... to be nothing more than one of those many residual
tendencies all of which con- verge in the overlooking of the act in
favor of the object."20
It is within the framework of his reflective and
'transcendental' phenomeno- logical method and of the variously
stated theory of intentionality that Husserl offers
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his own solution to the problems of the theory of evidence,
truth, and ontology. To discuss further how the phenomenological
method and its discovery of intentionality put the nail in the
coffin of psychologism is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice
it to say that since the laws of logic and mathematics are the
product of intentional acts of the transcendental Ego and since
they are not descriptive and contingent, inten- tionality and
intentional acts could never be conceived in naturalistic,
reductionistic, or physiological terms. To conceive it in those
terms would undermine Husserl's entire anti-psychologistic
foundational project.
Comparative Discussion of the Avicennian and Husserlian
Conceptions of Intention and Intentionality
It is clear that the medical culture of which Ibn STna was a
part greatly influenced his philosophical work, particularly his
views on the nature of mind, perception, and intentionality.
Although in Ibn Sina we find an attempt to mediate between the
strictly physicalistic account of mental activity found in the
medical circle and the nonphysicalistic account found in the
philosophical circles, certain remnants of physicalism,
reductionism, and naturalism still linger in many of his writings,
even those that are philosophical rather than medical.
It is also clear that Husserl's background as a mathematician
and his desire to ground mathematics and the empirical sciences in
a truly scientific philosophy led him to the rejection of
psychologism and naturalism and to the development of a concept of
intentionality as not reducible to physiological states, since
physicality itself, and all other assumptions of the natural
attitude, are bracketed prior to the discovery of
intentionality.
I wish to argue that Husserl's account of intentionality is far
superior to Ibn Sina's, although Ibn Sina's contribution to the
theory of intentionality is certainly important both in itself and
for its influence on the Scholastic notion of 'intentional
inexistence'. As we have seen, it is from this Scholastic notion
that Brentano resur- rects the concept of intentionality that will
later allow Husserl to give us a new way of understanding
consciousness. Although in both Ibn STna and Husserl intention
refers to the 'meaning' of the perceived object, Husserl takes this
notion much fur- ther than Ibn STna precisely because he
de-materializes and de-naturalizes the con- cepts of intention and
intentionality and moves away from a substantive theory of
consciousness. For Husserl, consciousness (or mind, soul) is no
longer a substance but an activity, and this activity is
intentional. Consciousness bestows meaning upon the world rather
than finding meaning already in the world. Thus, the intentional
object is a product of the constitutive activities of consciousness
and of its directness. For Ibn STna, on the other hand, the meaning
signified by the object, although not a corporeal quality of the
object, is latent in the sensible form of the object. Thus,
although for Husserl the sheep constitutes the wolf-as-perceived,
and this includes the wolf's ferociousness, for Ibn STna the wolf's
ferociousness is latent in its appear- ance and comportment.
Ibn STna's account is naturalistic for two reasons. First of
all, his account of
Marina Paola Banchetti-Robino 79
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intentions is dependent on his account of perception, and his
account of perception suffers from a materialism that is inherited
from the medical tradition to which Ibn Sina himself contributed
greatly. Second, his account of intentions focuses on the object
rather than on the act. Intentions or 'meanings' are latent in the
object per- ceived, although they are not themselves sensuous
qualities of the object. They are in the object, rather than being
the product of the subject's actions. This is one of the aspects of
naturalism to which Husserl himself objected. As was recently
stated by Ronald McIntyre in his critique of Fred Dretske's
'representational naturalism', "senses are not properties of the
objects we intend.... [T]he sense belongs to the content of the
experience, while the properties belong to the object. An act is
in- tentional by virtue of having a sense or content, even if there
is no object that 'sat- isfies' this sense."21 It seems that
Dretske, at least in this respect, is guilty of thinking of
intentions or 'senses' in a way similar to Ibn STna. Thus, the same
criticism that McIntyre raises against Dretske could also be raised
against Ibn STna. For both Dretske and Ibn Sina, "senses are
properties of the sort that physical objects have. For Husserl,
they are abstract 'contents' of intentional thoughts or
experiences,"22 intentional thoughts being the acts that constitute
these very senses.
Husserl does not make either of the naturalistic mistakes that
we find in Ibn STna. First of all, Husserl avoids physicalistic
reductions of intentionality, perception, cog- nition, and other
mental faculties by suspending the natural attitude in which the
existence of the material world and the psychological empirical
self are taken for granted. Second, Husserl focuses on intentional
acts of the subject rather than objects. Husserl is able to arrive
at his conception of intentionality precisely by bracketing or
suspending all assumptions about a material world, a physiological
self, and a psychological empirical self. In doing this, Husserl
isolates consciousness as such and discloses its activities. From
this, Husserl understands that, even if one suspends belief in an
extramental reality, experience-as-such has meaning. Although
Husserl is not embracing a conception of consciousness as
disembodied, he never- theless realizes that meaning must not come
from outside consciousness. It is not latent in some extramental
reality. It is not given to a passive consciousness. Rather, it is
constituted by an active consciousness. Husserl is, thus, able to
divorce himself from both Brentano's and his own early psychologism
and naturalism, a psycholo- gism and naturalism that,
unfortunately, clearly permeate Ibn STna's understanding of
intentional meaning and of intentionality.
It is in these and many other respects that transcendental
phenomenology pro- vides an account of mental events-and
particularly of intentionality-that is supe- rior to that provided
by naturalistic theories. It is clear that both Husserl and Ibn
Sina, in their development of an account of mental events and
intentions, were greatly influenced by their training,
respectively, as a mathematician and a physician. The physician was
drawn toward naturalism because of a need to locate mental func-
tions in a particular part of the brain in order to explain
injuries to those functions. The risk of this, however, is to fall
into a reductionistic program that is not able to explain the
quality and meaningfulness of our mental life. The mathematician
Hus- serl, on the other hand, was drawn toward a transcendental
account because of his
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desire to escape psychologism. In doing so, Husserl was
successful in providing us with an account of experience and mental
life that is much richer than the natural- istic account found in
Ibn SiTn.
Notes
1 - Avicenna, Sobre Metafisica (Antologia), trans. from the
Arabic, with an introd. and notes, by Miguel Cruz Hernandez
(Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1950), p. 37. The original text
reads as follows:
El ser es el objeto primario y proprio de la metaffsica.... El
ser per se es la sustancia; dentro de esta distingue las formas
separada y material y la materia, que es la sustancia de orden
inferior.
... Ilega Avicena a la conclusi6n de que una cosa puede existir
legitimamente en el espiritu y faltar en los objetos exteriores; a
esta existencia le llama ser intencional.... En su teorfa del
conocimiento la usa para explicar la relaci6n entre los objetos y
el sujeto.
2 - Avicenna, "Concerning the Soul," in F. Rahman, Avicenna's
Psychology: An English Translation of Kitab Al-Najat, Book II,
Chapter VI with Historico- Philosophical Notes and Textual
Improvements to the Cairo Edition (Oxford University Press, 1952;
reprint, Westport, Connecticut: Hyperion Press, 1981), p. 30.
3 - Noriko Ushida, Etude Comparative de la Psychologie
d'Aristote, d'Avicenne et de St. Thomas d'Aquin (Tokyo: Keio
Institute of Cultural and Linguistic Studies, 1968), p. 158. The
original text reads as follows:
Les formes sensibles sont ... des qualites corporelles qui
affectent les organes sensoriels en sorte qu'elles sont revues
en vertu de leur similitude. C'est pourquoi elles sont revues en
premier lieu par les sens externes, et ensuite elles sont
transmises aux sens internes. Mais les sens que les objets
signifient ne sont pas telles qualites corporelles, mais plutot des
qualites ou des valeurs qui sont latentes dans les formes
sensibles, telles que les qualites agreables ou desagreables, bonne
ou mauvaise, sympathique ou antipathique, etc.... Par exemple,
I'animal, en voyent un liquide jaune qui est du miel, juge qu'il
est doux et va le gouiter. La douceur saisie par ce jugement n'est
pas sensible, quoique cette qualite en elle-meme soit sensible, car
elle n'est pas encore gout~e actuellement par I'animal.... La
brebis, en percevant la figure, les cris et I'odeur d'un loup, juge
qu'il est f6roce et dangereux, et le fuit tout de suite. Ce n'est
pas seulement qu'elle saisit I'objet vivant par la simple
acceptation de certaines de ses qualites vitales, mais aussi par
I'at- tribution de ces qualites 'a I'objet.
4 - Deborah L. Black, "Imagination and Estimation: Arabic
Paradigms and Western Transformations," Topoi 19 (1) (2000):
60.
5 - Ibid. 6 - Ibid., p. 61. Black is here quoting Avicenna,
Al-Shiff': AI-Nafs (Healing: De
anima), in Avicenna's "De Anima," Being the Psychological Part
of Kitab al- Shifa', ed. F. Rahman (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1959), 4.1, p. 166.
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7 - Richard Sorabji, "From Aristotle to Brentano: The
Development of the Concept of Intentionality," in Aristotle and the
Later Tradition, ed. Henry Blumenthal and Howard Robinson, Oxford
Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Supplementary volume (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 236.
8 - F. E. Peters, Aristotle and the Arabs: The Aristotelian
Tradition in Islam (New York: New York University Press, 1968), p.
163.
9 - Abderrahman Tlili, Contribution a I'Etude de la psychologie
a travers la phi- losophie avicennienne, preface de Roger
Deladriere (Tunis: Universite de Tunis I, 1995), p. 78. The
original text reads as follows: L'esprit ... est une substance
subtile repandue dans le corps. S'elevant du coeur, elle se dirige
dans les arteres et donne naissance a la vie, a la respiration et a
la pulsation arterielle et, partant du cerveau, elle passe dans les
nerfs et produit la sensation et le mouvement.
10- Ibid., pp. 79-80. 11 - Harry Austin Wolfson, Studies in the
History of Philosophy and Religion, vol. 1,
ed. Isadore Twersky and George H. Williams (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1973), p. 283.
12 - Ibid., p. 284. 13 - Edmund Husserl, The Paris Lectures,
trans. Peter Koestenbaum, with an intro-
ductory essay (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1964), p.
xxvii. 14 - Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure
Phenomenology and to a Phe-
nomenological Philosophy, First Book, trans. F. Kersten (The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1982), ? 90, p. 217.
15 - For one excellent account of this history, I refer the
reader to Sorabji's "From Aristotle to Brentano."
16 - Ibid., p. 247. 17 - Franz Brentano, Psychology from an
Empirical Standpoint, ed. Linda McAlister,
trans. A. Rancurello and D. Terrell (London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1972), pp. 88-89.
18- Ibid. 19 - Edmund Husserl, "Prolegomena," Logical
Investigations, trans. J. N. Findlay
from the second German edition of Logische Untersuchungen
(London: Rout- ledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), vol. 1, chap. 5, ?25,
p. 114.
20 - Natalie Depraz, "When Transcendental Genesis Encounters the
Naturalization Project," in Naturalizing Phenomenology: Issues in
Contemporary Phenome- nology and Cognitive Science, ed. Jean
Petitot, Francisco J. Varela, Bernard Pachou, and Jean-Michel Roy
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 484.
21 - Ronald Mclntyre, "Dretske on Qualia," in Petitot et al.,
Naturalizing Phenome- nology, p. 433.
22 - Ibid.
82 Philosophy East & West
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Article Contentsp. 71p. 72p. 73p. 74p. 75p. 76p. 77p. 78p. 79p.
80p. 81p. 82
Issue Table of ContentsPhilosophy East and West, Vol. 54, No. 1
(Jan., 2004), pp. 1-112Front MatterKans in the Dgen Tradition: How
and Why Dgen Does What He Does with Kans[pp. 1-19]Dharmakrti and
Priest on Change[pp. 20-28]'Place' and 'Being-Time': Spatiotemporal
Concepts in the Thought of Nishida Kitar and Dgen Kigen[pp.
29-51]From Cannibalism to Empowerment: An Analects-Inspired Attempt
to Balance Community and Liberty [pp. 52-70]Ibn Sn and Husserl on
Intention and Intentionality[pp. 71-82]Feature ReviewThe Shifting
Contours of the Confucian Tradition [pp. 83-94]
Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 95-99]Review: untitled [pp.
99-103]Review: untitled [pp. 103-106]Review: untitled [pp.
106-109]
Books Received [pp. 110-112]Back Matter