On the Concept of Intentional Being

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: Introduction to the Concept of IntentionalBeing 1-12Chemistry and Biology 4-7Psychology 7-10Aesthetics and Linguistics 10-12

Chapter 2: Some Basic Aristotelian Concepts 13-33Categories and Metaphysics 13-18Relations 18-20Ousia 20-24Form and Matter 24-29Universals 29-33

Chapter 3: From Plotinus to Second Intentions 35-51Plotinus 36-39Porphyry 40-42Boethius 43-46Second Intentions 46-51

Chapter 4: From Brentano to Realist Phenomenology 53-68Brentano 53-57Husserl 57-61Ingarden 61-65Current Realist Phenomenology

66-68

Chapter 5: Intentional Habits and their MaterialDependence 69-83The Dependence of Habit on the Material Structure of the Subject 71-78The Dependence of Habit on the MaterialStructure of the World 78-83

Bibliography 84-86

Chapter 1:

Introduction to the Concept of Intentional

Being

The purpose of this thesis is to outline a working concept of

intentional being, to trace its presence in various works spanning

the history of philosophy, and to note one especially important

characteristic, its dependence on the material. Intentional being

is generally not recognized in current philosophical theories. If

any effort is made to introduce students to metaphysics or

ontology, they generally get two options: they can be dualists or

materialists. Dualist theories are presented as outdated and only

necessary for justifying belief in religious entities such as God

or the immortal soul. To most of us, raised with a scientific

mindset, an immaterial (sometimes termed “spiritual”) form of

being of this sort is a dead hypothesis from the start; and if

dualism and materialism are presented as a dichotomy, we must be

materialists rather than accept the “ghost in the machine”.

We embrace empiricism, but again we fail to grasp it in its

essence: instead of including everything we experience in our

ontology, we equivocate experience with sense experience, and

include only what is tangible: matter. We say that the triangle-

in-itself does not exist, but only individual instances of

triangularity. Yet we continue to refer, in cognition and in

language, to a triangle that is no particular triangle. We say

that it is not real, and by not real we mean immaterial. But

whether or not it is immaterial, it exists in thought and in

language; it would seem, then, that we must ascribe to it some

kind of being. It does, in fact, exist in some manner; and if it

exists, we may say that it is realthough it is certainly not

material.

Material being, ideal being, and intentional being are all

real. Of all of these material seems the most resistant to

definition. Ideal being we may define as non-spatial and non-

temporal; that is, it does not have the characteristics we

generally ascribe to material being. The triangle that is no

particular triangle is the same as it ever was and ever will bea

three-sided figure whose interior angles add to 180 degrees.

Intentional being is also immaterial, though it is temporal. It

comes into being and is capable of being destroyed. The work of

art, the meaning of a particular phrase, and the habit I have

formed over time have all come into being at some point in time

and may pass out of being. Material being, that which we tend to

assume accounts for the real external world, is more obscure. If

we assume, with basic chemistry texts, that matter is something

that has mass and takes up space, then we must exclude light (for

not having mass), and we must exclude space (as space cannot

logically take up space). If we include energy among material

things, our definition becomes more representative of reality, but

it seems that there is no single defining characteristic (or set

of characteristics) that identifies “matter”. We continue to

describe laws that govern its behaviour, but what it is remains

On the Concept of Intentional Being

unclear. We may do better to define material with Aristotle, as I

will do in the next chapter.

Beginning with Aristotle’s rejection of Plato’s forms, we

begin to see in the literature the concept of a type of being that

is immaterial but not eternal. I intend to provide enough of a

background to this concept that when I later support current

realist phenomenology’s return to Aristotle, the reader will be

able to comprehend exactly what that entails. In order for there

to be a return, however, there must have been a divergence. This

we see in ancient Aristotelian commentators, such as Plotinus’

attempt to reconcile the Categories with Platonic doctrine. With the

return of the Metaphysics in the Medieval age, we see the foundation

for Brentano’s notion of intentionality. With this notion,

however, carries over what he terms the “mental inexistence of the

object”the intentional object is not real. These divergences must

be dealt with in turn if the current realist phenomenological

conception of intentional being is to be upheld.

The material dependence of intentional being will arise

during this discussion, and in the final chapter I will discuss

the example of a habit as exemplifying this material dependence.

To say that it is a dependent type of being defies, as we will

see, assumptions of formal ontology that Husserl uses when he

carries over Brentano’s idea that the intentional object could

possibly not exist. Ingarden, rather than dismissing

intentionality as non-real, identifies it as dependent. Though

dependent, it is distinct. The dependence of intentional being on

the material provides fodder for those who would reject it as non-

real. For example, if the work of art is destroyed when the canvas2


is destroyed, opponents will say that it must have been nothing

more than the canvas itself; or if the mind is destroyed when the

brain is destroyed, they will say that the mind must have been

nothing more than the brain. The illogic of such statements will

become evident.

In this introductory chapter, I shall briefly discuss some

key problems in various fields, problems that would not exist were

we not imprisoned within a materialist paradigm. These examples

are intended to emphasize the importance of a study of intentional

being and its relevance.

The current conception of intentional being bears a stronger

resemblance to the treatment of being in the Aristotelian corpus

than to any of the later conceptions of the ancient or modern

commentators on Aristotle, which I will outline in the following

chapters. These intermediate ideasthough some are based directly

on Aristotle’s worksdiverge from those of Aristotle in some

crucial and sometimes confounding ways. There are many possible

explanations for this divergence: some philosophers may not have

had access to Aristotle’s Metaphysics, others may have relied on

suspect translations, or may simply not have wanted to contradict

a traditional interpretation. I will attempt to account for these

divergences, where possible, in the following chapters. For the

moment, I will simply state that intentional being in the current

realist phenomenological sense can best be understood with respect

to description of the modes of being given by Aristotle. Jeff

Mitscherling describes these succinctly:

3


While matter has “material” being, form has “formal

being”. Formal being is of two sorts, “ideal being” and

“intentional being”. In cases where the form is

identical with the idea—as in the case of numbers, for

example—the form enjoys ideal being. In cases where the

form is that of an organic unity—in which the form

consists in the relation of parts in an organic whole—it

enjoys ‘intentional being’. A relation, that is to say,

as an instance of formal being, enjoys intentional

being.1

In the following chapter I will detail Aristotle’s concepts of

material being (the sort of being exhibited by the material cause

of an object’s existence), formal being (the sort of being

exhibited by the formal cause of an object’s existence), and

relation. For now it will suffice to say that a relation includes

both thought and perception, or that these are characterized by

the same sense of directedness Brentano attributes to

consciousness when he says in Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint that

mental phenomena are “those phenomena which contain an object

intentionally within themselves”2; that Aristotle’s forms exist in

things, in thought and in perception but nowhere in themselves

(with the exception of mathematical entities, such as numbers, as

no collection of five entities exhibits “fiveness”); and that

formal causation is a notion of natural science—forms are a part

1 Mitscherling, Aesthetic Genesis, 20.

2 Brentano, PES, 89.

4


of nature. They are one of the four causes Aristotle lists in the

Physics, generally referred to as the material, formal, efficient

and final causes:

All the causes not mentioned fall into four familiar

divisions. The letters are the causes of syllables, the

material of artificial products, fire and the like of

bodies, the parts of the whole, and the premises of the

conclusion, and in the sense of “that from which”. Of

these pairs the one set are causes in the sense of what

underlies, e.g. the parts, the other set in the sense of

essence—the whole and the combination and the form. But

the seed and the doctor and the deliberator, and

generally the maker, are all sources whence the change

or stationariness originates, which the others are

causes in the sense of the end or the good of the rest;

for that for the sake of which tends to be what is best

and the end of the things that lead up to it. (Whether

we call it good or apparently good makes no difference.)

Such then is the number and nature of the kinds of

cause.3

To conceive properly of how the form is both a cause of the thing

and our perception of it, Mitscherling provides a further

distinction: “In the case of the wooden chair, the form enjoys ideal

being. In the case of my concept of that chair, the form enjoys

intentional being.”4 3 Aristotle, Physics II 3, 195a15-27, The Complete Works, 333.

4 Mitscherling, Aesthetic Genesis, 77.5


If my conception of the chair is a relation to the chair

according to the Aristotelian concept of a relation, and by virtue

of the same directedness that is characteristic of all of my

conceptions, then it is intentional. To relate this distinction to

the definitions of formal being from Mitscherling I’ve earlier

cited, the form in the wooden chair is identical with the idea of

the chair. Were the example, instead of a chair, to be some

organic structure, the form would be intentional. Intentional

forms are responsible for both organic unities as well as

perception and concepts.

Chemistry and BiologyRupert Sheldrake proposes “The Hypothesis of Formative Causation”

in his work The New Science of Life as a solution to such unsolved

problems in biology as morphogenesis (the process by which an

organism develops in form), behaviour, evolution, and psychology.

As Sheldrake states, “The hypothesis of formative causation proposes

that morphogenetic fields play a causal role in the development

and maintenance of the forms of systems at all levels of

complexity.”5 Morphogenesis is the creation and persistence of a

particular shape over the development of an organism, its growth,

regeneration and reproduction. Under the current scientific

interpretation, by and large materialist, these problems are

supposed to be accounted for by genes and other material

components of an organism, e.g., DNA folds according to a minimum

energy structure. Sheldrake cites problems with the popular

5 Sheldrake, New Science of Life, 74-5.6


interpretation, for instance, as I cite below, the fact that there

are many possible structures with equal (minimal) energy.

Sheldrake refers specifically to the multiple minimum

problem: elements of an organic unity are thought to come together

into a formation of minimal energy. The problem is that there are

multiple minimum energy states, yet the components seem to

consistently prefer one state to any other:

Although chemists, crystallographers and molecular

biologists cannot carry out the detailed calculations

necessary to predict the minimum-energy structure or

structures of a system a priori, they are able to use

various approximate methods in combination with

empirical data on the structures of similar substances.

In general, these calculations do not permit unique

structures to be predicted (except for the simplest of

systems), but only a range of possible structure with

more or less equal minimum energies. Thus these

approximate results appear to support the idea that

energetic considerations are insufficient to account for

the unique structure of a complex chemical system.6

As a solution to this problem, Sheldrake proposes that the

final structure is contained as a potential within the

morphogenetic field, which interacts causally with the material,

and thus explains the organization of structures which seem to

self-organize. In Sheldrake’s system, which I will explain at

greater length in Chapter 4, morphogenetic fields are a subclass6 Sheldrake, New Science of Life, 71.

7


of morphic fields, which he proposes to explain individual

behaviour, group behaviour, perception and thought. In the domains

of chemistry and biology, morphogenetic fields are proposed to

explain morphogenesis without introducing the same problems as are

given by the energetic or mechanical explanations. That is, they

are proposed in order to explain organic unities.

The problem of self-organizing chemical and biological

systems is especially significant with regard to modern

evolutionary theory, particularly, the origin of self-replicating

systems. Self-replication is significant to my discussion, as it

is a primary example of what some philosophers would call a

“transfer” of form. When we use the word “transfer”, however, it

seems we’re assuming a spatial entity has moved from one place to

another, and spatiality is something we can attribute only to

material things. Campbell et al. cite the most prevalent theory of

the origin of life as originating from inorganic materials.7 A

major setback to this theory, prior to 1953 and the work of

Stanley Miller, was that amino acids were not thought to form

spontaneously in the presence of their chemical components.

Stanley Miller encouraged spontaneous formation of amino acids by

replicating the conditions of early Earth, generating organic

molecules. What Miller demonstrated with his experiment is not,

however, an explanation of organic formations. He demonstrated

only that more elementary molecules do, in fact, form into

recognizable organic structures, and this despite the multiple

minimum problem. According to Sheldrake, formative causation can

7 Campbell et al. Biology: Concepts & Connections, 320.8


provide the explanation for such phenomena. Sheldrake explains by

analogy:

In order to construct a house, bricks and other building

materials are necessary; so are the builders who put the

materials into place; and so is the architectural plan

which determines the form of the house. The same

builders doing the same total amount of work using the

same quantity of materials could produce a house of

different form on the basis of a different plan. Thus

the plan can be regarded as a cause of the specific form

of the house, although of course it is not the only

cause: it could never be realized without the building

materials and the activity of the builders. Similarly, a

specific morphogenetic field is a cause of the specific

form taken up by a system, although it cannot act

without suitable ‘building blocks’ and without the

energy necessary to move them into place.8

I will be examining Sheldrake’s work later with particular regard

to his arguments against a strictly materialist interpretation of

natural phenomena, though Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields do not

accurately describe formal causation as conceived of by current

realist phenomenology. Like intentional being, however,

Sheldrake’s fields propose a system whereby material and

immaterial types of being interact. The incongruency arises from

the concept of a field as spatial; Mitscherling states, “Forms,

that is to say, are not spatial entities—they do not enjoy spatial8 Sheldrake, New Science of Life, 75.

9

existence.”9 Sheldrake’s morphogenetic fields, however, are

occasionally defined as spatial, for instance when he compares

them to Faraday’s electromagnetic fields: “A rough analogy [for

morphogenetic fields] is provided by the ‘lines of force’ in the

magnetic field around a magnet; these spatial structures are

revealed when particles capable of being magnetized, such as iron

filings, are introduced into the vicinity.”10 The reason this is a

‘rough’ analogy is, according to Sheldrake, that the morphogenetic

field represents a potential, whereas the electromagnetic field is

a result of the actual state of the electromagnetic system. ‘Lines

of force’ and electric fields were proposed by Faraday to explain

the effects of magnetism, and though they themselves are not

measurable, they can be inferred according to their effect on

entities within their vicinity—specifically, iron filings in the

vicinity of a magnet. We must recall that any field is made

evident only by its effect on things placed within its proposed

vicinity. The concept of a ‘field’ was introduced as conceptually

convenient, to solve the problem of action at a distance. Einstein

admits that the field conception is ‘somewhat arbitrary’:

As a result of the more careful study of electromagnetic

phenomena, we have come to regard action at a distance

as a process impossible without the intervention of some

intermediary medium. If, for instance, a magnet attracts

a piece of iron, we cannot be content to regard this as

meaning that the magnet acts directly on the iron

through the intermediate empty space, but we are9 Mitscherling, Aesthetic Genesis, 77.

10 Sheldrake, New Science of Life, 78.

constrained to imagine—after the manner of Faraday—that

the magnet always calls into being something physically

real in the space around it, that something being what

we call a ‘magnetic field’. In its turn this magnetic

field operates on the piece of iron, so that the latter

strives to move towards the magnet. We shall not discuss

here the justification for this incidental conception,

which is indeed a somewhat arbitrary one.11

PsychologyMany psychological concepts could benefit from an acceptance of

intentional being. Key concepts, the bases of much research and

theory, are left ontologically unexplained (though it seems the

assumption is that they will be explained by further neurological

study). Take, for instance, the idea of ‘personality’. Susan

Cloninger, author of Theories of Personality, defines it as “the

underlying causes within the person of individual behaviour and

experience.” She goes on to explain, “Personality psychologists do

not at all agree about what these underlying causes are.”12 While

identity and concepts of the self are common philosophical themes,

psychology seems to take these terms as working definitions to be

explained sometime in the future. A conflicting definition of

personality is given by James Kalat, who states, “Personality

consists of all the consistent ways in which the behaviour of one

person differs from that of others, especially in social

situations.”13 This behavioural definition is contradicted by

11 Einstein, Relativity, 63.

12 Cloninger, Theories of Personality, 3.13 Kalat, Introduction to Psychology, 491.

Cloninger, who cites Walter Mischel’s research determining that

“situations are more powerful than personality as determinants of

behaviour.”14 This, however, contradicts Cloninger’s own definition

of personality, which is supposed to be the underlying cause of

behaviour. If situational factors are the underlying cause, we

would have to say that the situation a person is in is a dominant

part of their personality. The question persists: where is the

personality? It seems to me that, if we’re to make any sense of

the situational dependence of personality, we would have to say

that personality is dependent on material entities outside of

one’s individual body. That is, the most powerful determinant of

behaviour does not exist in anything we would normally term “the

person”, which we normally define in material terms. What

personality is only seems to become more and more obscure as we

attempt to study its supposed effects. What these theories have in

common, is that both seem to interpret personality as an efficient

cause of individual actions. That is, the personality is the

potential action, and the particular action is that potential

realized; it is the moving billiard ball that bumps another

billiard ball (the individual action) and puts it into motion.

Given the difficulty in spatially locating a personality, or

even an individual action for that matter, an intentional formal

cause seems much more fitting to the problem. Behaviour, according

to Mitscherling, enjoys intentional being, as do habits, or the

habitual behaviour which is supposed to define personality in some

theories. In this conception, the habit is the formal cause of the

behaviour (though all behaviour is informed). With regard to its

14 Cloninger, 7.

situational dependency, we may look to Merleau-Ponty, who says

with regard to the formation of a habit:

the subject does not weld together individual movements

and individual stimuli but acquires the power to respond

with a certain type of solution to situations of a

certain general form. The situations may differ widely

from case to case, and the response movements may be

entrusted sometimes to one operative organ, sometimes to

another, both situations and responses in the various

cases having in common not so much a partial identity of

elements as a shared meaning.15

Here Merleau-Ponty is referring specifically to motor habits, but

the analogy to social behaviour is not so far removed. In fact,

the habits of individuals, both motor and social, as well as the

habits of species (instinct) and of nature itself (natural,

scientific laws), are all explained by Sheldrake with regard to

morphic fields. These fields are said to be, effectively, a sort

of individual or collective memory.

If there is to be any way to predict behaviour, i.e., any way

to subject behaviour to scientific study, then there must be

something to account for why certain behaviours are consistent. My

final chapter will examine habit, to demonstrate how intentional

being is necessary to understanding actions and behaviour. A habit

(exhibiting intentional being) must affect the material world

(i.e, he or she performing the action as well as what is acted

15 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 164-5.

upon), and is also affected or determined by the material, which

may account for inconsistent behaviour.

Mental fields are the type of morphic field postulated by

Sheldrake that are responsible for perception, thought and

memory.16 From the house-building analogy offered above, we can

conclude that it is Sheldrake’s belief that the brain is a

necessary component for mental activity, but it is not sufficient

in and of itself. This denotes necessarily a distinction between

the mind and the brain and, to follow the analogy, that the

material component is necessary but itself insufficient to explain

mental phenomena. Memory, like personality (and we may say that

one needs a memory in order to have personality) is an ill-defined

concept, generally said to exist either in individual neurons or

in the synaptic connections between neurons (as in the familiar

saying, ‘neurons that fire together, wire together’). These

theories are a result of the assumption that memory, and mental

phenomena in general, are sufficiently accounted for

materiallythey are in the brain. Without making this assumption,

all we have is the phenomenon that the brain is altered by

repetitive action. This is not evidence that the brain is itself

sufficient to explain mental phenomena. Having said this, there is

a distinct lack of correlation between what memory is supposed to

be (material) and how it is supposed to behave. This is most

evident in the various theories of memory and, in particular,

memory failure. Memory failure, if memory is to be thought of

materialistically, must be a degradation of matter or synaptic

connections.

16 Sheldrake, The Sense of Being Stared At, 279-80.

The materialist interpretation of memory seems to be the

motivation for decay theory, an early theory of memory failure.

According to decay theory, memory should decline linearly over

time. This would make sense if memories were material entities

that degrade over time. Upon experimentation, however, it was

found that “memory is not affected so much by passage of time as

by what happens in that time.”17 Directed Forgetting also seems to

counter-indicate a materialist theory of memory. Reed Hunt et al.

cite a successful experiment demonstrating that test subjects were

less likely to recall specific information if they were previously

told that it was unimportant, or to concentrate on something else.

Control groups, who were told no such thing, but who studied the

same information for the same amount of time, recalled more of

what the test group was told to forget. If memory is subject to

the will or intention (these too being vague concepts) of the

individual, a materialist interpretation seems insufficient.

Aesthetics (and Linguistics)Ingarden’s The Literary Work of Art puts forward as a problem the mode of

existence of the work of art. Since he’s dealing specifically with

the literary work of art, we can also see some problems arise for

linguistic communication in general.

Ingarden’s statement of the problem runs thus: there are two

ontically autonomous and independent (these terms will be examined

in the section devoted to Ingarden later on) modes of being, the

material (which Ingarden terms “the real”) and the ideal. Material

objects “originate at some point in time, exist for a certain

17 Reed Hunt et al. Fundamentals of Cognitive Psychology, 205.

time, possibly change in the course of their existence, and

finally cease to exist,”18 whereas the contraries of all of these

characteristics are true of ideal objects. He then uses a specific

example, Goethe’s Faust, in order to determine its characteristics,

and if it can be said to be real or ideal. Like a real object,

Faust came into being at a certain point in time, can be changed in

time (examples Ingarden uses are edits or new editions), and can

cease to exist. But despite changes or edits, Faust remains Faust.

The text itself, however, is nothing but sentences strung

together; sentences have meaning because of the individual words

composing that sentence; and the individual word meanings are

ideal. From this angle, the literary work of art seems to be a

composition of (ideal) sentence meanings (an ideal ‘sense’, or

Sinn19), composed of (ideal) word meanings. So the question must be

asked: How can something which seems to be real consist of things

which are only ideal? A third mode of being is required that is

dependent on both the real and the ideal, and this is the

intentional.

Ingarden later clarifies the mode of being of the various

meaning units we encounter when communicating linguistically. As

we will see later, the work of art consists of four strata; the

first stratum is the language itself with respect to word sounds

and phonemes, or the material of language, while the second

stratum is the meaning which that language communicates. Subsumed

under this second stratum are five elements of meaning, which

Mitscherling summarizes as follows:

18 Ingarden, LWoA, 10.

19 Ingarden, LWoA, 1

(1) The intentional directional factor of the word

meaning is that moment of the meaning in which the word

‘refers’ to this and no other object.

(2) The material content of the word meaning consists

of those moments of the meaning that determine an object

with respect to its qualitative condition; that is, the

material content ‘attributes’ determinate features to

the intentional object.

(3) The formal content of the word meaning is revealed

in the formal structure of the intentional object; that

is, the formal content is the function of treating what is

determined by the material content as a formally

determined, structured entity—for example, a ‘thing’, a

‘property’, or a ‘process’.

(4) The moment of existential characterization of the

word meaning is the function of regarding the

intentional object according to a particular mode of

being; that is to say, as either existing ideally or

existing really.

(5) The moment of existential position is the function

regarding the intentional object as existing in a

particular ‘reality’—for example, in the factually

existing space-time reality or in some ‘fictional’

reality (such as Hamlet’s Denmark).20

These elements of meaning will be significant in my later

discussions with regard to the ontology of language discussed by

Aristotle’s commentators; and I will introduce Ingarden’s theory

20 Mitscherling, Roman Ingarden, 132-3.


more completely in the fourth chapter. The intentional directional

factor of meaning describes the linguistic reference to something.

This reference to something outside of itself demonstrates a

commonality between linguistic meaning, Brentano’s concept of

intentionality that I’ve mentioned previously, and also the

Aristotelian concept of a relation. In other words, a word is not

ontically independent but depends on something other than the word

itself, that to which it refers, or its meaning. The material

content of the word meaning is stated to attribute certain

qualities to the thing to which it is intended to refer. Take, for

instance, the word ‘table’. The meaning of ‘table’ brings with it

table attributes such as having legs and a top, but these cannot

be said to come from any particular table. The word meaning itself

dictates these attributes. The formal content of the word meaning

ascribes a structure to the meaning of the word, the examples

given being ‘thing’, ‘property’ or ‘process’. Our ‘table’ example

is determined by its word meaning to have the formal content of

‘thing’. Again, our understanding of the table as a thing is not

due to a particular reference to any one table, but from the

‘table’ which is represented by the word.

The remaining strata describe how our ‘table’ exists—that is,

if we are to think of it as existing really or ideally, and in

what situational context. That is, the meaning of an individual

word depends on an ideal concept or a real thing. Were it to refer

only to something ideal, we might be comfortable in attributing

only ideal being to a meaning, but this is not the case.

18


I have given above some cursory explanations of the problems that

abound in various fields of current study—organic unity,

unexplained psychological terms, art and linguistics. These, I

believe, are the most accessible suggestions of the importance of

the concept of intentional being. In addition to these, however,

there are many more lines of inquiry which intentional being could

benefit. I have already mentioned perception and cognition. These

larger problems are well beyond the scope of this thesis, as are

intentional being’s place in ethics and religion.

In what follows I shall concentrate on providing a necessary

foundation for these further topics of study. Beginning with

Aristotle’s Categories and Metaphysics, and concluding with current

realist phenomenology, I will trace conceptions of intentional

being as a second type of immaterial being distinct from ideal

being. I will then attempt to describe how intentional being

exists in nature alongside material and ideal being by examining

how intentional being depends upon the material. To say that they

interact may be misleading, so I shall explain how material being

is necessary for the subsistence of intentional being. I will do

this by examining a habit as something subsisting intentionally

while remaining dependent on the material world; that is, as made

possible by and limited by material constructs.

19

Chapter 2:

Some Basic Aristotelian Concepts

As I stated above, the current realist phenomenological conception

of intentional being draws heavily on concepts introduced by

Aristotle. Here I will attempt to provide exposition of the most

central of these concepts, to provide necessary information to

allow the reader to follow the thought of subsequent authors

introduced in the following chapters, and to elucidate some of the

basic assumptions underlying the current concept of intentional

being. I’ll begin with some general notes on the subject matter of

the Categories and the Metaphysics, discussing more specific topics

towards the end of this chapter. The first specific topic I will

deal with is the category of relation. This requires explanation,

as the concept of a relation for Aristotle differs from what we

might think of today. In fact, it is directly comparable to the

sense of intentionality we’ll see later when discussing Brentano.

While for Aristotle, thoughts and perceptions are relations, in

that they refer to something outside themselves, Brentano

describes them as intentional, in that they are directed. I will

then discuss the concept of ousia and attempt to establish a basis

for using it as identical to “being”. This “being” will be said to

be an activity rather than “stuff”, which we might have assumed

using the translation for ousia as “substance”. This will lead into

a discussion of form and matter, both of which are types of ousiai,

and a discussion of how they can be said to “be”. Next I will

differentiate forms from universals, universals being a major

topic in the authors I shall expound upon in the following

chapter.

Categories and Metaphysics

Aristotle’s Categories was identified in antiquity as the first book

in Aristotle’s great body of work,21 and it is generally accepted

to be a logical treatise. The subject matter of its fifteen

chapters revolves around the classification of things which could

serve as subjects or predicates in a statement. The varying

interpretations offered by subsequent authors of what it means to

be a subject or a predicate will be examined in later chapters.

The rediscovery of the Metaphysics, which Pini situates around the

beginning of the 13th century, sparked new discussion concerning

the status of the Categories as a logical work, for Categories

introduces and deals with many of the issues with which Aristotle

deals at greater length in the Metaphysics. The status of the

categories themselves, or what it means for them to “be” when

Aristotle refers to the “being of the categories”, is something I

will attempt to elucidate with reference to the Metaphysics.

In both the Categories and the Metaphysics, Aristotle lists the

categories; in the Metaphysics, the number of categories has been

reduced to eight, from ten in the Categories. Aristotle states in

chapter 4 of the Categories: “Of things said without any combination,

each signifies either substance or quantity or qualification or a

relative or where or when or being-in-a-position or having or

21

? Pini, 6. Pini attributes this placing to Andronicus of Rhodes.

doing or being-affected.”22 Aristotle introduces these as the types

of things that can be said. When not said in combination, they are

neither true nor false; in combination, however, the affirmation

produced is necessarily either true or false. In Chapter 3,

Aristotle differentiates between things that are said “in

combination” and others that are said “without combination”.23

While things said in combination can be true or false, those said

without combination cannot be either; “man” cannot be false,

whereas “man runs” can be. In the Metaphysics, Aristotle lists the

categories once again:

Those things are said in their own right to be that are

indicated by the figures of predication; for the senses

of ‘being’ are just as many as these figures. Since some

predicates indicate what the subject is, others its

quality, others quantity, others relation, others

activity or passivity, others its place, others its

time, “being” has a meaning answering to each of these.24

Comparing this passage to the one just given from the Categories, we

can see that the categories of ‘having’ and ‘being-in-a-position’

have been eliminated. Brentano suggests reasons for the reduction22 1b25.

23 1a17.

24 Aristotle, Complete Works, 1017a22-7, p. 1606. Hope translates this passage: “The varieties of essential being are indicated by the categories; for in as many ways as there are categories may things be said to ‘be.’ Since predication asserts sometimes what a thing is, sometimes of what sort, sometimes how much, sometimes in what relation, sometimes in what process of doing or undergoing, sometimes where, sometimes when, it follows that these are all ways of being.” Metaphysics V 7, 1017a22-7, from Hope, p. 98.


in his On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle in his attempt to deduce the

categories from the various existing modes of being. The

Metaphysics, unlike the Categories, speaks of the categories not only

as things which are said, but as themselves modes of being. It is

this assertion that led Brentano and others to believe that the

categories could, in fact, be deduced. This is contrary to the

Neoplatonist theories that the categories, as the ‘highest

genera’, could not be deduced, as they have no definition. If they

are that in terms of which definitions are formulated and

according to which other things are defined, then they themselves

must simply be given. That the categories could be modes of being

is also the motivation for differentiating between the studies of

the Categories and the Metaphysics; while it is accepted that the

subject matter is similar, the mode of consideration is said to

vary between the works. The Categories considers the categories

logically, whereas the Metaphysics considers them metaphysically or

ontologically. Along with these considerations comes a

corresponding interpretation of what it is that the categories are:

logical terms or modes of being. If they are modes of being, then

we may say that there are either 8 or 10 distinct modes of being

according to Aristotle. As Buchanan states, “It is important to

note that Aristotle clearly implies… that ‘to be’ has a different

meaning not only for each of the categories, but for each of the

terms with which it is used in predication. From this point of

view the categories, or figures of predication, would be the

highest genera, having no common genus above them, of all the

species of predication.”25 This conception gives a distinct mode of25 Buchanan, 13.

23


being not only to each of the categories, but to each of the

possible predicates subsumed under the categories; that is, to

anything which can be said ‘without combination’. It is the first

category, however, to which Aristotle ascribes independent being,

the being upon which all other possible categorical determinations

depend. As Buchanan explains, this first “category” is substance,

or ousia.

As we have seen, Aristotle asserts that “being”, or “to

be”, has a different meaning for each of the categories.

Of these, only the being of the first category, ousia, is

a case of being simply or absolutely, while “to be” in

all the other categories means to be something i.e., to

be an attribute or accident of some ousia. Hence, only

ousia has separate being, or existence, and all the

entities in the other categories depend upon ousia for

such being or existence as they have. Accordingly,

Aristotle continues, ousia is first in knowledge and

definition as well as in time; the other categories both

exist and are known only in virtue of ousia.26

My discussion of ousia will have to be confined to a following

section, but I wish here to describe the concept as it is

introduced in the Categories in order to keep it in the context of

the rest of the book and to distinguish it from Aristotle’s

conception of primary being; Aristotle and his translators use the

terms in different ways in the Categories than in the Metaphysics, and

when we encounter the term first in one work and then in the26 Buchanan, 21.

24


other, we must keep in mind that their meanings are not

interchangeable.

In the first section of the Categories, Aristotle differentiates

homonymous, synonymous and paronymous being. Homonymous being

refers to things which are referred to by the same name but which

are different (e.g., a man and a picture, both animals);27

synonymous to those referred to by the same name in the same way

(e.g., a man and an ox, both animals); and paronymous those things

whose name derives from something else (e.g., a grammarian from

grammar). Aristotle then proceeds to classify things according to

whether they are said of a subject or are in a subject, explaining

and giving examples of each of the four possible combinations of

these two qualifiers with reference to an object: “man” is said of

a subject but not in a subject—Socrates is a man, though “man” is

not in him; “individual white”28 is in a subject but is not said of

a subject; “knowledge” is both said of and in a subject (though

the subject it is said of varies from the one it is in); and

individuals are neither in nor said of a subject. Primary ousia, in

the Categories, is “that which ‘is neither predicated of something

nor present in something underlying’… Here the primary ousia is

thus present, individual concrete being.”29 In the Metaphysics,

however, the “essence, or ‘the what it is to be,’ is called

‘primary ousia’; for the essence is the very Being (ousia) of the27 Later I will mention how the being of the categories themselves is, according to Brentano, homonymous.

28 The ‘individual white’ differs from white as an ideal quality according to its being non-autonomously. I will later be discussing Ingarden’s explanation of the non-autonomous being of “red”.

29 Werner, 24, quoted: Cat. 5, 2a12f.25


individual, that in virtue of which it can in its turn be called a

Being (ousia).”30 This is actually the result of a longer

examination of “primary being” by Aristotle in the Metaphysics, by

the end of which he determines that the ‘first meaning of primary

being’ is to be a subject matter, or “that about which anything is

said and which is itself never said of anything else.”31 This

definition coincides with that of the Categories giving primary being

as that which is not predicated of something else.

There is a secondary meaning of primary being, however,

present in both the Metaphysics and the Categories. In the Categories,

there are secondary ousiai, which are the species and genera—the

“what”. It is in this function that the ousia becomes a predicate;

Werner gives the example of the statement, “This is a house,”32

where “this” is the primary ousia and “house” is secondary, or a

“what”. The “what” is another form of primary being which

Aristotle lists in the Metaphysics, but which is not the “first

meaning of primary being”: “‘Primary being’ means four, perhaps

more, ways of being: (1) being a what; (2) being a generality; (3)

being a kind; and (4) being a subject matter.”33 The primary being

of the Categories reflects the fourth of these definitions, whereas

the first three are all examples of what the Categories refers to as

secondary ousiai. The first definition I will examine later with

regard to Aristotelian forms, and the second with regard to

30 Buchanan, 49.

31 Metaphysics VII 3, 1029a2, 132-3.

32 Werner, 25.

33 Metaphysics VII 3, 1028b33-4, 132.26


universals, species and genera. The third may be defined here,

according to Aristotle’s exposition of what it means to be ‘of the

same kind’ in the Categories. In that chapter Aristotle explains the

transitive property of predication and the difference between

differentiae of genera of which neither is a species of the other.

As he explains, knowledge is not a subordinate genus to animal,

and so their differentiae will be different ‘in kind’,34 as

knowledge is not two-footed, nor is there an animal of grammar.

Thus ‘kind’ seems to link together certain subjects with certain

possible predicates.

I must insert a note before I begin discussing some

Aristotelian concepts in detail, as I have already been treating

the concepts in the Categories and the Metaphysics as, if not

equivalent, certainly commensurable. Although in later chapters I

will discuss how commentators have distinguished between the

logical and the metaphysical interpretations of the categories and

have argued among themselves in favour of one or the other, I must

note here that it is possible that Aristotle made no such

distinction between a thing and its linguistic representation. The

term ‘category’ itself seems to favour the linguistic

interpretation, as its etymology includes a sense of announcement

or declamation.35 It is certainly not clear that Aristotle would

34 Categories 3, 1b17.

35 “kategorein ‘to accuse, assert, predicate,’ from kata ‘down to,’ + agoreuein ‘to declaim (in the assembly),’ from agora ‘public assembly.’ Original sense of ‘accuse’ weakened to ‘assert, name’ by the time Aristotle applied kategoria to his 10 classes of things that can be named.” From http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=category. Accessed June 10, 2008.

27

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=category


separate the metaphysical from the linguistic as exclusive types.

As A. C. Lloyd explains,

And although [Aristotle] is notoriously indifferent

about distinguishing explicitly between reference to

linguistic and to non-linguistic objects (even between

use and mention) this indifference does not often or

obviously indicate that he is confused. Should it not be

put down in some measure to his instinctive tendency to

believe that linguistic concepts can be basically

explanatory? It is easy to speak of an instinctive

assumption that language and nature have an ‘isomorphic

structure’ and the like—confused or meaningless as such

an assumption may well be.36

Regardless of Lloyd’s appraisal of an assumed ‘isomorphic

structure’ between language and nature, his assessment of

Aristotle indicates that the application of such an assumption is by

no means accidental in Aristotle’s works. If this is true, we can

assume that Aristotle held such an assumption and applied it

intentionally, and that if references to the linguistic or

ontological aspects of the categories seem intermingled and

confused, it is likely evidence of the assumed equivalence of the

logical with the ontological. Keeping this in mind will aid in my

following examinations of the pertinent topics from the Categories

and Metaphysics.

Relations36 Lloyd, 46.

28


A short discussion of relations in Aristotle should accustom the

reader to the treatment of relation given in later chapters.

Primarily what I want to emphasize here is that a relation is a

term denoting the characteristic of a thing to be referred to

something outside of itself. Contrary to the manner in which we

are used to using the word “relation”, relations in the Categories

include relations between “real” entities (such as the double and

the half) as well as relations between a subject and an object.

“The following, too, and their like, are among relatives: state,

condition, perception, knowledge, position.”37 Also, “All relatives

are spoken of in relation to correlatives that reciprocate,”38 for

example, the double and the half, knowledge and the object of

knowledge. Not only are relations an example of what we will later

call intentionality, we should note that Aristotle, as with

current realist phenomenology, does not confine relation or

intentionality to either the subjective or the non-subjective (the

mental or the extramental) realm.

Along with relation comes the question of priority, or the

question of which is prior when we consider a relation between two

things. Can we say that the known is known only by virtue of there

existing a mind capable of knowing? In that case, a mind would be

considered prior to what is known. In the Categories, relatives are

described as things which reciprocate. One of the ways of being

“prior” is that the existence of one thing implies another,

whereas the existence of the second does not imply the first, as

37 6b2-3; 6b3-4 continues: “For each of these is called what it is (and not something different) of something else.”

38 Categories 6b27.29


in the example of two and one—the existence of “two” implies the

existence of “one”. But this is not reciprocal, and this is how we

determine the priority of one over two. Aristotle introduces

another example, that of the existence of a man and the statement

that asserts the existence of the same man. If the man exists, the

statement is true and vice versa; therefore there is

reciprocation, yet we still say that the existence of the man is

prior to the truth of the statement. Relatives also reciprocate,

but there remains a question of priority. It has been said that if

there is knowledge, there must be something known and vice versa,

and if we parallel the examples completely, it seems that

knowledge depends for its existence on the known (as known).

In the Metaphysics Aristotle lists three ways in which

something can be called a relative:

“Relations” are (1) quantitative, as double to half,

threefold to third, and in general the manifold to the

correlative fraction; also, what is greater than another

is relative to it. (2) in the sense in which fuel is

relative to what it heats, or a cutting instrument to

the cut, or in general an agent to what it acts upon.

(3) In the sense in which the measurable is relative to

the measure, and knowable to knowing and the perceptible

to perceiving.39

The question of priority with regard to the third type of relative

finds a more comprehensive answer, however, where Aristotle

determines that what is thinkable, knowable or measurable (etc.)39 Metaphysics V 15, 1020b26-32, Hope p.109.

30


is relative to the thought, knowledge or measure. What would seem

to be a one-sided dependence of that which is thinkable on thought

(etc.), is not to say that anything thinkable depends for its

being on a thinking subject, but only as it is “thinkable”.

Aristotle uses perception to exemplify this distinction; sight is

relative to its object, but this object is real: “for ‘seeing the

seen’ is redundant”,40 whereas “seeing white” would not be. Thus a

relative is the thing to which something else refers. The

“thinkable” is that to which thought refers: “For a thing is

‘thinkable’ when it is possible for a thought to refer to it, but

the thought is not relative to what is being thought, for these

are two ways of saying the same thing.”41 While the thinkable,

perceptible, etc. depends for its being upon thinking, perception

and the like, it is not true that the objects themselves do:

In general, if there were only the perceptible, there

would be nothing if there were no animate beings; for

there would not be sense perception. It would

undoubtedly, then, be true that there would be neither

perceptible objects nor perceptivity (for this is a

quality of the perceiver); but it is impossible that the

subjects which stimulate perception should be only in

perception. For perception itself is surely not of

itself, but there is something else besides the

perception; for what moves is prior in nature to what is

40 Metaphysics V 15, 1021b2-3, Hope 110.

41 Metaphysics V 15, 1021a31-2, Hope 110.31


moved, and even if these are correlatives, this is no

less the case.42

To say that what is thinkable, what is perceivable, becomes so

only in the presence of a thinking, perceiving subject would lend

to the theory that these are only properties we have attributed to

objects, as those thinking, perceiving subjects, that these

properties can be described with the mental inexistence of

intentionality. But when we think of things that can be perceived,

we attribute their perceptibility not to our own perception, but

also to the properties in the thing that render them perceptible

to us. We are able to perceive tangible things because our senses

allow us to; this describes both our nature as well as that of the

thing. That is, there is something in the thing that renders it

perceptible, and it is something we have not attributed to it. In

the absence of a subject, an object remains in that it continues

to exist outside of perception.

We can sum up this problem by saying this: the perceptible

object is real; or the object of our perception is real, as is the

object of cognition. Or we may update our language and say simply

that the intentional object is real, that if it were not real, we

would not be able to form a relation (by cognition) with it, and

that outside of our cognition of it, it retains some property that

renders it cognizable.

Ousia

As Werner Marx states,

42 Metaphysics IV 5 1010b30-1011a1, Hope 81.32


The various ways or senses of ‘being’—as Aristotle would

say, the various categories—are all related to one of

them which is primary and normative, that is, to ousia.

They are dependent upon ousia for their meaning. The

primacy peculiar to ousia is precisely a consequence of

this, for ‘of the other categories, none can exist

independently, only ousia’. Consequently only ousia has

the sense of ‘simple being, as such’ (haples on), whereas

the others can be called being only ‘in some way’ (pos),

that is, mediated by their dependence upon ousia.43

Marx identifies the whole of Aristotle’s ontology with ousia, which

he accordingly terms ousiology.44 In the Categories, as we have seen,

ousia is identified with primary being as the individual, whereas

secondary ousiai are the species or genus. In the Metaphysics, the

same term which is generally translated in the Categories as

“species” (eidos) is again said to be an ousia, the thing’s form

(distinguished from its shape, or morphe), as well as its material,

and the peculiar being of the form in conjunction with the

material. Before I discuss the formal and material ousiai, however,

I should discuss ousia itself.

Ousia is translated as “substance” in standard texts, which

comes from the Latin translation “substantia”. Apostle translates

ousia as all of “substance”, which he takes as synonymous with

43 Marx, 18. Reference: Meta Z1, 1028a33f.

44 “The unique characteristic of Aristotle’s ontology is that it is ousiology.” Marx, 19.

33


“essence”, and “nature”.45 Buchanan, however, believes that

translating ousia as “substance” is, at least, misleading, and he

provides an etymology leading to the conclusion that a more

accurate translation of ousia is ‘being’: “Ousia means Being, since

it is derived from the present participle of the verb einai (‘to

be’); just as parousia, from pareinai, means being present. It may

also, on occasion, be translated as ‘mode of being’. ‘Substance,’

which means a standing under, or that which stands under, is

misleading when it is used for ousia.”46 Buchanan’s main purpose in

his work Aristotle’s Theory of Being is to determine that ousia is an

activity which is not motion or change, and that Aristotle’s

purpose in defining ousia is to contradict Plato’s conception of

what it is to be as presented in the Sophist.47 If we were to take

Plato’s conception that what it is to be is to be able to act or

be acted upon, then we would already be assuming that what it is

to be is to be a thing or an object capable of action or receiving

action. Rather, we should prioritize action itself in our

definition of what it is to be.

With regard to the individual as ousia, Buchanan cites

Aristotle’s identification of ousia with to ti en einai (“what is was to

be” or “essence”) as the reason that ousia is identified as45 Apostle, 52: “The word ousia is here translated as ‘substance’, and a synonym of ‘substance’ is ‘essence’, and sometimes ‘nature’…. We often speak of the nature or essence of a thing, like the nature or essence of a triangle or of motion or of virtue or of man; and this nature is made known analytically through a definition. We shall retain the word ‘substance’ for the sake of consistency in our translations.”

46 Buchanan, 1.

47 Buchanan gives the definition of ‘to be’ as presented in Plato’s Sophistas “to be able to act or be acted upon.” Buchanan, 2.

34


“essence” (as Apostle identified them above). He states, “In

identifying ousia (Being) with to ti en einai, Aristotle is asserting

that the fundamental reality on which everything else depends is

the existence of individuals, each existing according to the mode

proper to its species.”48 The “essence” of a thing, Buchanan

states, is literally the being of a thing as distinct from its

properties or attributes. Aristotle proceeds, however, to go

beyond the question of what ousia is in general, to what the ousia

is of each individual thing: “In Book Z of the Metaphysics, where

Aristotle attempts to answer the question, What is ousia?, it is

clear that the question can no longer be answered by saying that

the concrete individual is ousia, for here Aristotle is asking what

the ousia of each thing is.”49 The ousia of an individual thing, he

answers, is the to ti en einai, or “what it is for each thing to

exist”.50 The individual is the primary ousia of the Categories, but

the individual is a composition of form and matter, which, as

component aspects of the individual, would seem to be prior to the

individual in some sense, and therefore must also be ousiai. What it

means to be is, therefore, primarily the individual, or what

things appear to be when we encounter them in the world. These are

the things we experience primarily, as formed matter. But the

individual may also be decomposed into parts, its form and matter

separated (whether we think of this as an abstraction or as

differentiating real component parts of an individual thing). Thus

48 Buchanan, 2.

49 Buchanan, 5.

50 Buchanan, 2.35


we have three ousiai in the Metaphysics, the form, matter, and the

composite individual. This is in contrast to the Categories. The

Categories presents formed matter as primary and the species (eidos,

form) as secondary ousiai; matter was not considered to be ousia.

As stated earlier, Buchanan views Aristotle’s statement that

ousia is energeia (actuality or activity) as a contradiction of

Plato’s concept of “what it is to be” in the Sophist. In the Sophist,

Plato presents the view that being is dynamis, or as Buchanan

states, “the power to act on something else or the potentiality

for being acted upon by something else.”51 Energeia is commonly

translated as either actuality or activity, and therefore the

statement that ousia is energeia means that being is not the power to

act (or be acted upon) but is activity itself: “Since nothing can

be without being, and since ousia is the primary Being on which all

other things depend, ousia must be energeia rather than dynamis…

hence, if Aristotle is contradicting or correcting the doctrine of

the Sophist, the assertion that ousia is energeia should mean that

Being is an act, or activity, as opposed to the power to act.”52

Ousia as an activity is not, according to Buchanan,

motion or change or process. It appears now, however,

that the Being of a natural, material existent, is not

something apart from change, but is manifested in

change. Indeed, the activities given as examples in the

Metaphysics—seeing, living, being happy—all involve

51 Buchanan, 55.

52 Buchanan, 55.36


changes in the living being; but regarded simply as

seeing living, and being happy, they are not changes.53

These examples are given in the Metaphysics as actions which have no

end outside themselves, but whose end is the action itself.

Now, the doing of an action is its own end, as seeing is

the end of vision; and from the activity of seeing no

further product results. But there are other activities

which produce something: house-building produces a

house, which exists apart from the activity of building.

Nevertheless, in both cases the action is final when

compared with the potential being in the former case not

less an end, and in the latter more of an end, than the

power is. For the construction of a house is realized in

the house constructed and is begun and completed

simultaneously with the house. Hence, in those cases in

which something beyond the activity is produced, the

action lies in the product: the activity of building

lies in the house being built; weaving is in the textile

being woven; and so forth. In general a movement is in

the thing being moved. But where there is no product

beyond the activity, there the action is inherent in the

agent: seeing is in him who sees; knowing, in him who

knows; and living is in the actually living being. Hence

living well, or happiness, is an actuality; for it is a

53 Buchanan, 60.37


kind of living. Consequently, it is evident that the

primary being or form is actual.54

Therefore, if ousia is an activity of the sort whose end is in

itself, and ousia is the primary being of a thing, its form, its

matter, or the composition, then these must be interpreted not as

components of a whole but instead as various modes of being: the

individual is both formally as well as materially being, yet, as we

encounter it and how it exists, is in its being as a composite,

and these are activities whose ends are in themselves. As Buchanan

states, “What it is for a thing to be, its mode of existence,

turns out to be its primary mode of activity.”55 When we consider

material, ideal and intentional being, then, we should not equate

these with different kinds of stuffmaterial stuff, ideal

stuffbut rather with activities that are what it is to exist. When

we say that something has both form and matter, these are not

intertwined kinds of stuff, but two modes of being that coexist

not in but as one thing. And if these types of being are not stuff

but activities, there is no reason they should be subject to the

formal ontological principle that states that one thing may not

exhibit two kinds of being.

Form and MatterAs Aristotle states in the Metaphysics,

54 Metaphysics IX 8, 1050a23-b4, Hope 194.

55 Buchanan, 60.38


A subject matter is primary being in one of three ways:

it may be a material (and I mean by material whatever

though it is not actually a this-something or an

individual, can become one); or it may be the formula or

the shape, which, being a this-something can have its

own separate being only logically; or it may be the

synthesis of these, which alone is generated and

destroyed and is in an unqualified sense a separate

being.56

From this passage we can make several assertions: (1) that the

form, the matter, and the composite are all ousiai; (2) that of

these only the composite can exist independently; (3) that the

form or shape considered independently is a logical, not a real

entity; and (4) that matter for Aristotle is not equivalent to the

modern conception of matter. The first of these assertions was

examined in my previous section; an examination of the third and

fourth should support and elucidate the second.

The existence of a separate “form” (eidos) Aristotle says to be

an absurdity, for such a theory, he believes, is based only on an

abstraction from the sensible, the result of which is to assume a

parallel to the sensible based on an abstraction alone:

the greatest absurdity is to declare that there are

certain natures independent of the celestial motions,

and then to declare that they are, nevertheless, like

sensible and perishable natures, except in being

eternal. For these men maintain that there is a man-56 Metaphysics VIII 1, 1042a25-31, Hope 170.

39


himself, a horse-itself, health-itself, and so forth,

about which they give no further information; and they

establish these after the manner of those who assert

that there are gods but that they are like men. For such

theologians merely establish eternal men; and such

philosophers represent ideas as being merely sensible

objects eternalized.57

Aristotle gives further support for identifying such a theory of

ideas as an absurdity by doubting its ability to explain what it

is intended to explain, the sensible, by another form of being

which is no less complicated: “For their ideas are precisely equal

in number to, or not fewer than, the objects which they are

supposed to explain by referring each object to its idea. For

corresponding to each thing there is something which has the same

name and is independent of it, whether it be a primary being or a

composite being, and whether sensible or eternal.”58

And, as Lloyd states, “Metaphysics K 1060a21-24 denies Platonic

Ideas on the bald ground that form is destructible.”59 This passage

reads: “A form, or shape, seems to be a more genuine principle;

but it is perishable, so that, if it is a principle, there is no

eternal primary being at all that is separate and self-existent.”60

The form is perishable in the sense that when real existing things

change, their form changes, and a previous form gives way to a new57 Metaphysics III 2, 997b8-12, Hope 46.

58 Metaphysics XIII 4, 1078b35-a4, Hope 278.

59 Lloyd, 25.

60 Metaphysics XI 2, 1060a21-24, Hope 224.40


one: “Aristotle says several times that forms are destructible or

perishable. One minute they are there another they are not, for an

oak can be chopped down so that the form of oak is replaced by

that of timber, and when a person blushes pallor may be replaced

by crimson.”61

This is not to say, of course, that there is no such thing as

a generality, but only that it has no separate, independent

existence. It has a logical existence. Aristotle recognizes that

without the logical existence of the forms, there would be no

science, communication or human production; for science speaks of

generalities and not particulars, as do individuals in

communication; the form of a thing being present in the soul of an

individual is necessary should this individual set about any kind

of construction. It is in nature that these forms are said to have

no separate existence, as there is no naturally occurring point or

line to which one can refer that is not abstracted from a material

entity.

Now, things defined, or considered as they are, are in

two different ways: some, such as ‘snub,’ are not

independent of material being; others, such as

‘concave,’ are independent. A being may be concave

without being anything else; but a ‘snub’ being must be

a nose. If all natural entities, therefore, are like the

‘snub,’ that is, nose, eye, face, flesh, bone, and

animal generally or leaf, root, bark and plant

61 Lloyd, 25.41


generally, we cannot define or explain them without

reference to movement, since they are always material.62

This passage at first seems to suggest the independent being of

‘concavity’, but Aristotle maintains, rather, that all natural

entities are like the ‘snub’—existing with material. If concavity

is to have any kind of independent existence, it must be not

natural but logical.

Lloyd provides us with a warning about the terminology

generally used to describe forms. He says,

A final warning about terminology: Forms exist by being

either identical with substances or in them: there are

as many forms as there are substances and quasi-

substances. To say this is to say that forms are not

universals. It is sometimes said that forms are

individualized in particulars. This might mean the same

thing: but if so it is a dangerous way of saying it. It

suggests that there is something which is prior to the

individuals of a species—and prior in more than the

trivial logical sense—but which is somehow not ‘yet’ an

individual.63

This passage from Lloyd gives a brief differentiation between

Aristotle’s forms and universals, which will be dealt with in my

next section. What I want to point out here is Lloyd’s warning

against viewing a form as a separately existing entity. His

62 Metaphysics VI 1, 1025b30-26a4, Hope 124.

63 Lloyd, 43.42


phrasing, that the form could be but is somehow ‘not yet an

individual’, suggests that the form is somehow a potential

existent thing. Perhaps a better phrasing is provided by Marx:

That ousia is eidos, appearance, however, means above all—

and this is the meaning of the term most important for

the history of its effect on philosophy—that it is the

‘form’ in the sense of an active process of formation.

In the realm of transient being composed of form and

matter, eidos and hyle, the eidos forms the hyle into a

concrete individual, into a synholon.64

In this conception, the form is the active principle of an

individual (a real, existent thing), while the matter is its

potentiality. Aristotle conceives of potentiality as the power of

a thing to be transformed into something else, or of its form to

change, as in the previous example given by Lloyd of oak

transforming into timber. Buchanan concurs, saying, “Prime matter

is introduced to explain universal transformability, and as such

it is simply the potentiality, present in every material thing, of

becoming any other material thing, directly or indirectly.”65 If

matter (or prime matter) is in fact intended to represent only the

potentiality inherent in a natural entity, then its definition

surely varies from our modern conception.

Prime matter is what is theorized to be left over when any

possible categorical determination is removed from an individual

entity. As such, it would seem to be a candidate for the primary64 Marx, 28.

65 Buchanan, 29.43


being of a thing, but again we find that it doesn’t exist in

nature, that it exists as an abstraction only. Buchanan uses the

concept of matter to reject the translation of ousia as substance:

If Being were nothing but subject, or substratum, it

could only be matter. This matter, moreover, would be

what is left after we take away from our conception of a

particular individual everything which might be

predicated of it; and such a matter, regarded purely by

itself, could not be said either to be or not to be

anything, or of any quantity, or determined in any other

way, for all these predications would be only accidental

characterizations of it. This cannot be the fundamental

meaning of Being (ousia), for a Being must be separate,

individual, and distinctly characterized.66

Thus, according to Buchanan, the reason for rejecting matter as

the primary meaning of primary being is also the same reason we

reject that ousia is a substrate: ousia must be distinctly

characterized. If it were a substrate, then it would be prime

matter and therefore not capable of being distinctly

characterized. If it were matter, then it would be a substrate,

and a substrate as such exhibits the same problem of definition.

That neither form nor matter is capable of existing

independently in the sense required for either to be determined as

the primary mode of being of a thing leaves only the actually

existing thing as an instance of primary ousia. The form and the

matter may be said to be the actuality and potentiality of an66 Buchanan, 27.

44


existing thing. As Marx notes, if the form and matter are

potentiality and actuality, then in the existent thing they are

aspects of the same, or perhaps the same thing variously

considered: “The fact that the hyle and eidos of a being are one and

the same means nothing more than that they are understood as the

potentiality and actuality of a being, as the moving forces whose

interplay allows the being to be the particular being that it

is.”67 Again, we see that here matter is potential. Our common

conception of matter leads us to attempt to interpret potentiality

as something matter has, i.e., matter has the ability to be

transformed into various forms (and by forms, we often mean

shapes). This is clearly not how Aristotle intended matter to be

conceived. In addition, we see Marx denoting potentiality and

actuality as moving forces. This is consistent with our previous

conclusion that ousia, which form and matter are both classified

as, as Aristotle states explicitly, is an activity. The individual

existing thing engages primarily in the activity of being an

individual, and secondarily engages in the activities of being

formal and material, or actual and potential.

One last note from Aristotle should convince us that his

“matter” is not coincident with our current conception (according

to which matter has mass and spatial extension), for imperceptible

things can also be material:

For even some things which are not perceptible will have

matter, since there is matter in some sense in the case

of everything which is not ‘what-it-meant-to-be’

67 Marx, 37.45


anything, that is, not its own form itself, but is a

‘this-something’. The semicircle, then, is not a part of

‘the circle’ in general, but of the individual circles,

as has been said before; for as there is perceptible

matter, so there is also intelligible matter.68

Our original premise from the last section, that form, matter and

the composite are all ousiai, has therefore been complemented with

additional conceptions worked out in this section: forms exist in

the same way as logical entities; matter is not stuff that takes

up space; and neither can exist independently of the individual.

The form and the matter, therefore, are not pre-existing component

parts of the individual entity, but its modes of being—though its

primary mode of being is as a composite. When we later discuss how

intentional being is dependent on material being, we should recall

that material being is potentiality, that only something with

material being can be actualized, and that the material of what I

call a real entity (for instance, a habit) need not be composed of

atoms.

UniversalsSince we have identified the form to exist only within the thing,

then what it is to be part of a class is excluded from what we

have called the form. Where the form exists in the individual, a

“this”, a universal is what it is to be a “such”. Apostle provides

a convenient list of general statements concerning the universal

68 Metaphysics VII 11, 1036b35-1037a4, Hope 154-546


given by Aristotle, which he takes from both the Categories and the

Metaphysics:

(1) The universal by its nature is predicable of or

belongs to many. 17a39-40, 77a6-7, 644a27-8, 1038b11-

6.

(2) The universal does not exist as something separate

and apart from the many. 77a5-6, 85a31-5, 1038b30-3,

1040b26-7.

(3) That which is always and everywhere is said to be

universal. 87b32-3, 96a8-9.

(4) The universal is not sensible but intelligible.

87b30-1.

(5) The universal is not a substance or a this; it is or

signifies a such, or else a relation or a manner or

something of this sort. 87b31, 178b37-9, 1003a8-9,

1038b8-9, 1038b35-9a2, 1087a2.

(6) The universal exists in the soul. 100a6-9, 15-6,

432a3-6.

(7) The universal, being one beside the many, is the

same in all of them. 100a6-8.69

While this provides a concise overview of the universal, Aristotle

does have much more to say on the issue.

69 Apostle, 56.47


Aristotle introduces the universal in the Metaphysics as a

necessity. Whereas the primary being of something is correlated

with ousia (its form, its matter, or the combination), the

universal is not any of the ousiai. The concept of a universal must

be distinguished from a form in that the universal is not said to

exist within the individual, or to be one of its modes of being.

As I have already stated, a form, abstracted from the matter, is

not an independent subsisting entity but maintains logical being.

As Lloyd states, “No reader of Aristotle will wish to dispute that

except for prime movers forms without matter are found in the

soul, not in the external world: but some readers have strangely

failed to put two and two together by recognizing that to abstract

a form from its matter is exactly to turn it into a universal.”70

One of the points Lloyd wants to make in his book is that the

universal belongs only to thought and language. He does this by

asserting that the Aristotelian universal is not “in re”, but

“post rem”; that is, the universal is not in the thing itself but

only in the thought and language by which we refer to it.71

Such a universal is given by Aristotle to be necessary for

thought, but not perception. He states, “if there is nothing apart

from concrete individuals, then nothing would be conceived; all

things would be perceived, and there would be no science of

anything, unless one were to say that sense perception is itself

scientific knowledge.”72 We can take it as an assumption, then,

70 Lloyd, 9.

71 Lloyd, 2.

72 Metaphysics III 4, 999b2, Hope 51.48


that there is such a thing as a universal. The difficulty with the

universal is what and where it is—or how and with respect to what

it exists. The problem is, according to Aristotle, that if there

must be a universal, it cannot itself be a principle of being in

the same fashion as a primary being (a ‘this’): “if we were

permitted to suppose that what is predicated in common is itself a

this-something, then Socrates would be many animals: himself and

‘man’ and ‘animal’—if each of these indicates a this-something, or

a separate thing. These are the consequences of supposing

principles to be general. But if they are not general, but

individuals, they are not knowable.”73 But perhaps they are

knowable if it is the function of the intellect to abstract the

form from the individual and therefore, as Lloyd stated above,

convert the individual form to a universal:

For the concept is a form, namely the form of X’s (or of

X as a general term) abstracted from the particular

matter which any individual X possesses in order to

exist. Qua concept it is what we think, not what we

think about, e.g., men. For it is the class, Man (the

‘species’, as such a universal eidos is normally

translated), and this is, exists only as, its members.74

The concept, which is a universal, is “a creature of the

understanding”,75 and the universal to which Lloyd specifically

73 Metaphysics III 6, 1003a8-15, Hope 60.

74 Lloyd, 13-4.

75 Lloyd, 45.49


refers is the species. According to his conception, the universal

seems to be a creation of the intellect, based on the sense

perception of individuals. Aristotle has some peculiar things to

say about genera, however, that may prohibit us from defining all

universals according to this formula. As he writes: “‘Genus’,

then, means: first, the continuous generation of the same kind;

secondly, the first mover which is the same in kind; thirdly, the

matter, for the subject to which the differentia or the quality is

referred is also called its ‘matter’.”76 The first of these

definitions refers to the generation of beings of the same form

(e.g., man); the second definition refers to a cause which is

responsible for all such generation (e.g., the first of a race of

men). The third definition is more obscure, but we must recall

that Aristotle’s concept of “matter” is different than ours. As

Lloyd explains the third definition: “Aristotle not infrequently

equates genus with matter. His reason is that both represent

potentiality.”77 The first two definitions seem to indicate that

genera are somehow responsible for generation, which could not be

the case if they were only creations of the intellect. The third

definition, with Lloyd’s explanation, seems to indicate the exact

type of form which we were trying earlier to avoid, that of

something which is not yet actualized but potentially a being.

A few comments are necessary here regarding the notion of

universals in thought, as some insights into the universal and its

existence in thought provide indicators of problems yet to come.

76 Metaphysics V 28, 1024b6-9, Hope 119.

77 Lloyd, 32.50


We have a general conception of the universal which is the form

abstracted from the matter by the intellect, as a thought or

concept, but we should draw some distinctions between the

universal and a linguistic entity. One of the ways Lloyd

distinguishes the form from the universal is by observing that the

form belongs to a thing, whereas the universal is a concept. The

concept, however, is not linguistic: “The common features that we

attribute to the external world are not names, in so far as names

do not belong to language but to this or that language. They are

to be found in what is for Aristotle logically prior to language,

namely thoughts, of which ‘concepts’ is a synonym.”78 That is, a

thought and a concept are identical; that is to say, one does not

think of a concept of “tree”, but rather thinks “tree”. This is how

the thought and the concept are synonymous. As Marx explains,

“Like perception, thought is also receptive. However, because of

the peculiarity of its object as something not sensible, that is,

as something intelligible, thinking reaches a completion different

from that of perception: thinking and what is thought (noesis and

noema) prove to be one and the same.”79 This thought is not

linguistic; while in the first section of this chapter I noted a

correlation between the thing itself and the word that represents

it, the word is not the thought. This will be especially important

to remember when I examine later, with regard to Ingarden, the

intentionality of a sentence meaning and its relation to a

possibly real state of affairs. This is almost the exact

78 Lloyd, 2.

79 Marx, 6.51


distinction that Lloyd makes between universals and forms in

Aristotle:

Utterances and sentences belong to this or that

language. Propositions do not belong to a language; they

are combinations of concepts, and they are what

utterances and sentences mean. Things and states of

affairs are what make utterances and sentences true.

Universals are concepts and therefore belong to

propositions. Forms belong to things and states of

affairs.80

Untangling this passage, we can see a few assertions that Lloyd

attributes to Aristotle, namely: (1) that thought/concepts are not

linguistic (or pre-linguistic); (2) that propositions, composed of

concepts, are not equivalent to sentences, but to the meanings of

sentences; (3) that the meaning of a sentence is composed of

universals; and (4) that forms represent reality and therefore the

truth of a sentence, but not its meaning.

Universals are therefore distinct from the form that exists

in the thing, yet the ideas of form and universal often appear

together in the commentaries we’ll examine in the next chapter,

and it is for this reason that they need be distinguished here.

These short introductions to some basic Aristotelian concepts will

aid the reader in following the progression of the notion of

intentional being. Specifically, they will help the reader

understand what the realist phenomenologist means when he or she80 Lloyd, 3.

52


says that being is an activity, that the Aristotelian natural form

is “intentional” (as opposed to an ideal, eternal form), or that

the subject and object exist in relation to one another, in

cognition and in perception, wherein both are considered to be

real. In what follows, we’ll see how major commentators have

interpreted the Categories in isolation from the Metaphysics, then I’ll

provide a short summary of how interpretations of the Categories were

revised after the resurfacing of the Metaphysics. We will see how

diversions from these Aristotelian concepts have impacted notions

of immaterial being in what follows, and how these basic concepts

factor in to a return to Aristotelian doctrine in current realist

phenomenology.

53

Chapter 3:

Plotinus to Second Intentions

In the previous chapter I examined major concepts from the work of

Aristotle describing a metaphysics consistent with that of current

realist phenomenology. Ousiaform, matter, and their

compositedescribes the being of things existing in nature at its

most basic level, prior to the addition of qualifiers we see in

the other categories. We saw that being is an activity, and that

this activity, rather than stuff (what we might now call a

substance), is the basis of Aristotle’s ontology. We saw that form

and matter describe the actuality and potentiality of real

existing objects, and we saw that some of these objects exist in

relation to other objects, and that this is not just a notion

imposed on objects by a subject with a mind. Now we turn to

Aristotle’s early commentators to see how this ontology came to be

interpreted in a manner that renders it unthreatening to Plato’s

theory of forms, which I quoted Aristotle as arguing against in

Chapter 2.

In this chapter I will examine relevant arguments from three

philosophers—Plotinus, Porphyry, and Boethius—and provide a

summary of the doctrine of second intentions in order to describe

the divergence from Aristotle’s original intent by later

commentators and to demonstrate the ubiquity of a notion that

current realist phenomenology now calls intentional being.

Plotinus, in his remarks on the Categories, interprets the book as

attempting to describe a complete ontology and attempts to refute

that ontology on a Platonic basis. Porphyry, his student,

interprets the Categories as a logical work, in such a way as to

render it compatible with Platonic doctrine despite its obvious

metaphysical conflicts with this doctrine. In doing so, Porphyry

separates the notion of the Platonic Form from the eidos of the

Categories, the latter being incapable of separate existence except

as a logical entity. Boethius, in his argument for the existence

of universals, also relies on the existence of two types of

incorporeal being, one separable and independent, and the other

inseparable except by perception and the intellect. In the final

section of this chapter, I’ll provide a short summary of the

doctrine of second intentions, which arose around the time the

Metaphysics resurfaced. For this summary I’ll rely heavily on the

work of Giorgio Pini. While not examining any of the Medieval

authors in depth, I intend for this section to serve as

introduction to Brentano’s concept of intentionality, which he

states to have taken directly from medieval thinkers. In it we

will see the conflict that arises when the traditional

interpretation of the Categories, which we see starting with

Porphyry, is challenged by the resurfacing of the Metaphysics, which

would seem to demand reinterpretation of the concepts of the

Categories in metaphysical rather than logical terms.

Plotinus (204/5-269/70)As Pini explains, “The interpretation of the Categories as a work of

metaphysics is also quite old. Its most famous champion is

Plotinus, whose detailed criticism of Aristotle presupposes an

ontological reading of his treatise.”81 Plotinus’ criticism appears

in Enneads VI, On the Modes of Being, the sixth volume of the collection

of Plotinus’ works as organized and edited by Porphyry, his

student. Plotinus wrote the criticism of the categories towards

the end of Porphyry’s studies with him, and Porphyry will later

counter Plotinus’ metaphysical interpretation with his own logical

view of the Categories. According to Pini, Porphyry takes a logical

stance in order to counter Plotinus’ objection to the doctrine of

the Categories; however, if the intent were only to counter Plotinus’

objections, this would likely not require abandoning his basic

metaphysical interpretation, but only the specific criticisms;

Plotinus has been criticized82 for providing a superficial

criticism based on previous Platonic criticisms of the work.83

Plotinus discusses the Categories in Enneads VI.1, On the Modes of

Being. He introduces the categories as ten genera which “fall under

the name of ‘being’, or ten categories.”84 Plotinus agrees that the

being described by each category is distinct from the others, but

his main concern is that the categories do not describe the

intelligible beings. According to Plotinus’ conception, a lack of

reference to the intelligible beings, which for Plotinus are “most

authentically beings”,85 necessarily indicates a huge hole in the

ontology put forth in the Categories. This objection is likely the81

? Pini, 7.

82 By A.H. Armstrong, translator of the edition of Enneads to which I refer.

83 Specifically Nicostratus, according to the author of the introduction.

84 Plotinus, Enneads VI.1, 15.


source of subsequent criticisms of Plotinus, as it depends upon a

prior conception of a separately existing, incorporeal formal

reality, namely, that of the Platonic Forms. Given that a main

difference between Plato’s and Aristotle’s doctrines is that

Aristotle’s forms, as described in the Categories and the Metaphysics,

are not separately existing intelligible entities, it would seem

that Plotinus criticizes the Categories on the basis that it’s not

Platonic. As Apostle explains: “The universal as something

separate was posited by Plato, and this is a Form or an Idea. As

separated, it is one, an ousia, eternal, immovable, and a model or

pattern for the corresponding sensibles of which it is the cause.

But as separate, it appears to be an individual, and Aristotle

denies the existence of such an object.”86 Aristotle’s forms, if

they are to exist separately at all, are logical entities

abstracted from sensible objects. While not dependent upon the

cognitive act of the subject, they do not exist separately in any

way prior to abstraction, and when abstracted, they exist only

logically.

With regard to ousia (the first category), Plotinus asserts

that intelligible ousia is of a different sort than sensible ousia.

Given that only sensible ousia is described by the first category,

where examples of primary ousiai are individual entities, Plotinus

argues that this designation, with the assumed existence of

intelligible ousia, necessitates a more general ousia prior to both,

if they are to have anything in common (that is, substantiality).

The types of ousia Plotinus lists are those discussed in Metaphysics

VIInamely form, matter, and their composite. While these are

86 Apostle, 57.

completely separate (autonomous) ousiai that require unification

according to some commonality among them that designates their

substantiality, Plotinus describes this common substantiality as

being necessarily prior to these particular ousiai; this prior ousia

“is something else,”87 an ousia prior to form and matter. This

criticism again seems to reflect Plotinus’ Platonic foundations,

as it follows much the same argument as that for Platonic

formsnamely, that in order for there to be individual instances,

there must be a prior, separately existing formal correlate. This

prior ousia could be precisely an “ousia-in-itself”, and subject to

the same Aristotelian criticisms, namely that substantiality need

not exist separately from its instances. In Categories 5, the

composite (the individual, the “this”) is determined as the

primary ousia, while the species and genera are “secondary ousiai”.

The unification of form and matter is in the composite, not in

some separately existing substantiality.

Again I must note some of the intricacies of Aristotle’s

concept of ousia as I described it in the previous chapter,

specifically the conception of ousia as a way of being: the

“unification” of form and matter consists not in their coming

together to form a particular thing, but in the particular thing

existing both formally and materiallyform and matter are not

component parts, but distinguishable (conceptually, though

inseparable) modes of being of the individual. I must also note

that form, matter and the composite are listed as ousiai in the

Metaphysics, while at 2b35 of the Categories Aristotle states that “it

is reasonable that, of all things other than primary substances,



only the species and the genera should be called ‘substances’.”88

(This indicates a variance between the doctrine to which Plotinus

directs his criticism and that of the Categories.)

In addition to Plotinus’ general criticisms of the doctrine

of the Categories, I want to call attention to some particular

features that arise in the course of the argument. Plotinus’

discussion of the mode of being of a relation recalls what I’ve

already said in the section devoted to Aristotle. Plotinus

introduces in this discussion two types of incorporeal being: that

which exists in things related, and that which comes from

outside.89 Plotinus’ goal is to determine the nature of the being

of a relation, and he feels it necessary to separate relations

into several types; for he says that certainly some relations are

only imposed upon things, for example, “exceeding”: “Exceeding is

a matter of one thing of one definite size and another of another

definite size; and this one and that one are two different things;

the comparison comes from us, but is not in them.”90 This kind of

relation, according to Plotinus, causes us to doubt the very

existence of a relation (and is possibly a cause of determining

“relation”, as a category, as a concept rather than as an

existent). These relations seem to depend on the things

themselves; for example, objects which vary in position are

88 Apostle, 4.

89 “But let these philosophers tell us what common substantiality this being from each other has. Well now, this common reality cannot be a body. So it remains that, supposing it exists, it is incorporeal, and is either in the things related or comes from outside.” Plotinus, Enneads VI.1.35.

90 Plotinus, Enneads VI.1. 31.59


designated, due to this real state, “right”, “left”, etc. (and

similarly for time, with “before” and “after”); however, their

relation can change without any alteration to the thing itself,

and it is this kind of relation about which Plotinus says “our

suspicion arises that in things of this kind relation is

nothing”.91 In addition to these, however, Plotinus mentions “some

things in this state, as long as the subjects remain as they were,

even if they come separated, the state of relation persists.”92

The suspect relation, that which is imposed by us in our

examination of objects of a certain relationfor instance, in a

spatial relationwould be the relation that, Plotinus would say,

comes from outside. The second type of relation, that which is in

the things themselves and persists despite alteration to their

circumstance (for instance, a change in position) is of particular

interest here. This relation cannot be a body, according to

Plotinus; that is, it is not material. We could say that it is

that reference to something else that Aristotle speaks of, a

reference that does not dissipate if the things are spatially

separated, as long as the things themselves are not altered. If

Aristotle’s relations are not to be suspect in the views of

Plotinus, then we must be able to say that the relations Aristotle

introduces at 1021a27 (Hope 110) are of this sort, those not

simply imposed upon the things from outside but that are somehow

in the things themselves. In particular, we would have to be able

to say all of: (i) the relation of double to half persists if

91 Plotinus, Enneads VI.1. 33.

92 Plotinus, Enneads VI.1., 33.60


“double” and “half” are considered in themselves and not with

reference to particular objects; (ii) the relation of something

and what it affects need not be particularthe cutting knife

persists in relation to what is able to be cut; and (iii) the

relation of knowledge to the known, perception to the perceptible,

etc., persists despite there being no knowing or perceiving

actually taking place at a particular moment. That the relation of

double to half persists is an analytic truth; that it is true of

some particular objects is certainly true as long as those objects

are not altered. We can say the same of the cutting knifeit is

designed of material conducive to cutting what it cuts; if these

are not altered certainly the relation persists. And the relation

of perception to the perceptible also subsists; the perceptible,

in not being perceived, does not become imperceptible, only

unperceived. But it seems that these conclusions are given as long

as the relata remain what they are, which is Plotinus’ condition.

It is also interesting to note that, in the final sections of

Enneads VI.1, Plotinus criticizes the inclusion of “having” and

“being in a position” in the list of Categories, as these are the

very ones that disappear in the Metaphysics. Plotinus criticizes

those categories on the basis that they are only relations.93

In this section we have seen Plotinus argue against

Aristotelian forms, but it seems he must admit of a kind of

immaterial being capable of coming into existence and being

destroyed if he believes in the persistence of a relation between

objects. It is the nature of these objects to change, and at one93 See Brentano, On the Several Senses, 115. These are also the categories which fail to appear in Brentano’s attempt to deduce the categories from possible modes of predication.

61


point they did come into being; therefore if the relation persists

as long as the objects persist, and if the relation may properly

be said to exist, it must have some kind of immaterial, mutable

being. We have also seen Plotinus argue against Aristotle’s ousiai

on the basis that, if there is to be more than one type of being,

all types of being must have one common “being” between them. This

seems irrelevant if we consider being as an activity, for if we

define more than one activity (say, for example, swimming and

watchmaking), we do not require that there is a more common

activity that defines them both.

Porphyry (232-4-304/5)According to Pini, “Plotinus’ most famous pupil, Porphyry, is the

first Platonist to adopt the Peripatetic view that the Categories is

a work of logic in order to counter his master’s objections.”94

That Porphyry interprets the Categories as a work of logic means

that, in contradiction to Plotinus’ metaphysical interpretation,

Porphyry views the subject matter of the Categories as a science of

predication rather than of nature. In other words, the categories

denote concepts referring to things. The categories themselves

are, according to Porphyry, “the product of nature”.95 If the

Categories refers to nature, or the sensible world alone, then it

94 Pini, 8.

95 Porphyry, On Aristotle’s Categories, 32.62


does not impinge on the Platonic doctrine. As Strange states in

his introduction to Porphyry’s On Aristotle’s Categories, Porphyry was

able, with his logical interpretation, to “downplay the evidently

anti-Platonic metaphysical elements that the work contains and to

turn it into a basic textbook of logic for his revived school-

Platonism.”96

Some prominent features of Porphyry’s interpretation allowed

him to meld the Categories with Platonism. First, he says beings,

genera, species and differentiae are not themselves names, but

things;97 however, no affirmation can be made using things, but

only what signifies themspecifically, words: “For no combination

of things gives rise to an affirmation; rather it is the

combination of significant words indicating things that produces

an affirmation.”98 This statement is the foundation of the logical

interpretation. Second, he differentiates forms abstracted from

sensible objects from the Platonic Forms: where the former are

abstracted from nature, they are not intended to replace the

latter, transcendent universals, which are yet prior in being and

causes. The abstracted, Aristotelian forms are the basis of

language, since in normal conversation we refer to natural objects

and not Platonic Forms. The Aristotelian forms are “immanent”

forms, and are those which are abstracted in perception. Platonic

Forms are yet the cause of the immanent universals and are

therefore necessary in Porphyry’s ontology. As Strange reports,

96 In Porphyry, On Aristotle’s Categories, 3.

97 Porphyry, On Categories, 32.

98 Porphyry, On Categories, 33.63


“the Aristotelian abstractable universals that are the referents

of general terms can be included in our ontology alongside the

Platonic Forms: they are immanent universals, the Forms are

transcendent universals and the causes of both sensibles and of

immanent universals.”99 That is, and we should note, immanent forms

have a different sort of being than Forms; they exist in the

thing, are responsible for perception, and form the basis of

language.

For Porphyry words, which are signifiers of things, are not

only indicators, in the sense that the concept referred to extends

beyond the word itself. He says about the Categories that “The

subject of this book is the primary imposition of expressions,

which is used for communicating about things.”100 An expression,

however, has neither a higher nor a lower ontological status than

does its corresponding concept, “because definitions ought to be

convertible with names. To be convertible with a term is to be

commensurate with it, that is, to have neither a greater nor a

lesser extension than it does.”101 If something is to be named, then

this name is perhaps only a more convenient way of speaking about

it than to recite its definition. Having said that, we can see

what Porphyry’s motivation was in calling the categories

‘expressions’, for the categories are said to be the highest

genera; since a definition must include a genus, the highest

99 Strange in Porphyry, On Categories, 11. Strange reports his source as Simplicius’ In Categories and suggests that it is an amplification of Porphyry’s stance.

100 Porphyry, On Categories, 34.

101 Porphyry, On Categories, 43.64


genera cannot be properly defined, for there is no higher genus

above them.”102 The names of the categories, which ought to be

convertible with their definitions, must take the place of

definitions, of which there are none proper. The point of interest

is that these names come directly from the ten genera, which are

things and not words, and these names are to communicate the ten

ways by which beings are comprehended: “Since beings are comprehended

by ten generic differentiae, the words that indicate them have also come

to be ten in genus, and are themselves also classified.”103

That Porphyry designates the categories as indefinable

demonstrates that he separated his view from Plotinus on this key

point, that the categories, as the modes of comprehension which

have no common genus between them, need not all be species of

“being”. Each of them is a distinct type of logical entity. If

there are ten highest genera, and these refer to the sensible

only, Porphyry avoids Plotinus’ difficulty in defining the common

substance between the sensible and the intelligible, yet he would

have to admit that the Categories does not provide a complete

Platonist ontology. The difference of interpretation is that

Porphyry ascribes value to the work while regarding it as an

incomplete ontologythis is because it is, according to Porphyry,

not intended to be an ontology at all, but a treatise on logic.

Besides his commentary on the Categories, another of Porphyry’s

most famous works, his Introduction, was influenced heavily by the

102 “It is impossible to give definitions for any of them [the categories], for every definition contains a genus, and there is no genusof these: they are the highest genera.” Porphyry, On Categories, 75.

103 Porphyry, On Categories, 34, Italics mine.65


logic he extracted from his reading of Aristotle. According to

Barnes, “the stuff of the Introduction comes from the Peripatetic

school, and the ideas which it contains have a Peripatetic origin.

But if the work is Peripatetic, it is so only in the blandest of

manners. There is little in it that a Stoic could not acceptand

nothing that a Platonist should not accept.”104 In the opening to

his “Introduction”, Porphyry introduces a problem with regard to

substance:

For example, about genera and species—whether they

subsist, whether they actually depend on bare thoughts

alone, whether if they actually subsist they are bodies

or incorporeal and whether they are separable or are in

perceptible items and subsist about them—these matters I

shall decline to discuss, such a subject being very deep

and demanding another and a larger investigation.105

This passage seems to refer to the problems arising from an

examination of the Categories.106 Without the Metaphysics, it would seem

a difficult task to determine whether the categories were intended

to describe anything real. Thus it seems plausible that Porphyry

104 Barnes in Porphyry, Introduction, xix.

105 Porphyry, Introduction, 3.

106 Strange reports that Porphyry “is supposed to have written the Isagoge [Introduction] as an introduction to the Categories for his student Chrysaorius, a Roman senator who found himself befuddled by Aristotle’s terminology of the work.” [Strange in Porphyry, On Categories, 8.] Barnes notes in contradiction that “Porphyry’s essay, written as an introductionto the study of logic, was thereby an introduction to philosophyand hence accidentally an introduction to the Categories. But it is not an introduction to the Categories.” [Barnes in Porphyry, Introduction, xv].

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is willing to propose a logical, non-Platonist-offending

interpretation of the Categories. The problem arises here, with the

logical interpretation of the Categories, again when the Metaphysics

resurfaces around the thirteenth century, and again when Brentano

and Husserl dismiss the intentional object as inexistent or non-

real. The above-quoted passage is referred to directly by

Boethius, who intends to provide just such another, deeper

investigation than that in Porphyry’s Introduction.

Boethius (480-524/5)According to Pini, “Boethius maintains that the categories are not

the ten genera of being but the words signifying them.”107 Boethius

goes further than Porphyry who, as we recall, argued that names

and what they signify are interchangeable; Boethius instead

maintains that the categories are expressions, in that the

categories are only names, without the qualification that the names

are interchangeable with definitions which describe the essences

of things. The “being” of the categories, rather, is only a way of

speaking; their being is that which we attribute to them with the

verb, “to be”, which does not denote some real “being” that exists

outside of this linguistic imposition: “substance is, quality is,

quantity is, and the word ‘is’ is predicated of all the others in

common; however, it does not denote some single substance or

nature which they have in common, but is only a name.”108 Still,

107 Pini, 10.

108 Boethius, Commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge tr. George MacDonald Ross, http://www.philosophy.leeds.ac.uk/GMR/hmp/texts/ancient/boethius/bisagoge1.html Accessed May 13, 2008.

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http://www.philosophy.leeds.ac.uk/GMR/hmp/texts/ancient/boethius/bisagoge1.html



Boethius wants to establish that genera and species (or

substances) are not just fabrications of the intellect, and this

argument indicates one conception of intentional being.

Boethius’ commentary focuses on genera and species, which are

identified as secondary substances in the Categories. Substance,

Boethius claims, is the only category describing a thing’s

essence; the other nine are accidental descriptors. That is, the

only category that describes a thing’s being is substance. The

other nine are linguistic conveniences. It is possible that his

separating substance in this way weakens what he states concerning

the categories in general, that their existence is only a nameit

seems that if this were the case, substance would be excluded from

the linguistic interpretation of the categories. It seems less

likely that Boethius considers substance as a concept which is not

anything real; this would entail that any substantial beings

(corporeal or incorporeal) are in fact only descriptions imposed

by the intellect on whatever exists, and are therefore more

telling of the intellect than of the things themselves. The

difference between these two viewpoints correlates to a difference

in the being of things, such that their being is either real, or

substance is a descriptor, a method of distinguishing things which

seem to be so distinguished according to the habits of the

intellect (but not necessarily by anything existing outside the

intellect). Certainly when he discusses the problem of universals

his intent seems to be to found the genus and substance as coming

from the sensible object, yet the consideration of the genus or

species in separation of the thing is by virtue of the intellect.

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Boethius attempts to establish that the abstraction of a

universal from a sensible object by the intellect does not

necessarily make this universal anything unreal. The problem of

universals for Boethius is what type of being they may have, and

whether they can possibly be said to come from the object itself

or are products of the intellect alone. He argues against the

point that, given that the intellect can posit non-existing

things, it cannot be said that anything the intellect posits is

false. In doing so he establishes that even a thing that depends

on the intellect for its existence (such as the abstracted

universal from a sensible, its genus or species, or its abstracted

form), is not a fabrication of the intellect but in fact comes

from the thing itself.

As Boethius states the problem: “Genera and species either

exist and subsist or are formed by the understanding and thought

alone.”109 He summarizes the arguments for and against universals.

We’ve met with one argument for universals already in Aristotle,

who stated that no general knowledge may exist without universals.

That is, if a universal did not exist, then all general

(scientific) knowledge would be false, and the same would be true

of communication, for we communicate with universal terms. A truly

existing universal, however, must have the peculiar ontological

characteristic of being able to exist, in whole, in multiple

instances (that is, the individuals who subsist under a common

universal do not share it in parts, but rather each individually

may be said to exemplify the universal). There exists a

presupposition that if universals exist, they must have one of two109 Boethius, 21.

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types of being, corporeal or incorporeal. Against universals,

there is the idea that if a genus is in fact one genus, then it

cannot exist as a whole in each of many individuals, and a partial

genus existing in an individual is absurd; and if the genus is not

in the thing, but is yet understood, then this understanding does

not accurately reflect the thing itself and is therefore false. It

seems that to have any understanding of a thing with respect to

its relation to a universal, the universal must be in the thing

itself; otherwise, our scientific knowledge, our communication and

also our understanding are all (properly) false. Boethius attempts

to establish that it is not necessary that something which depends

on the intellect for its existence be necessarily false.

Previously I said that the form abstracted from the thing is a

logical entity alone (that is, it depends on the intellect for its

abstraction); this is exactly the type of entity the existence of

which Boethius is attempting to prove is, at least, not “false”,

and to do this, he uses the premise that there are, in fact, two

real types of incorporeal being.

Boethius’s solution begins with the observation: “We do not

say it is necessary for every understanding that arises from a

subject, but not as that subject itself is disposed, to be seen as

false and empty.”110 Boethius argues, adopting the reasoning of

chapter 2 of the Categories, that falsity arises from the composition

of concepts which may be true in themselves, but in composition

are false. For example, the expressions given in the Categories are

“man”, “ox”, “runs”, and “conquers”; these expressions, said

without combination, are neither true nor false. Falsity occurs110 Boethius, 23.

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when such expressions are combined in an affirmation; for example,

“man runs” and “man conquers” may be true, but “man flies” is

false. Thus the activity of the intellect to combine concepts has

the propensity to produce false statements. But the intellect also

has the ability to divide or abstract. To follow the previous

examples, we could observe a man running and abstract out the

concepts “man” and “runs”. These two concepts arise from a single

observation; the man running does not appear as the addition of

two concepts, “man” and “runs”, but, as Boethius notes, “if this

understanding arises from division and from abstraction, then the

thing is not disposed in the way it is understood, and yet that

understanding is not false at all.”111

The difference between the genus as it is disposed in a body

and the way it is understood, is precisely that between its

existing in or existing separate from a corporeal entity. Boethius

claims two types of incorporeal being, one which subsists without

a corresponding corporeal, and one which subsists only in a

corporeal. At this point we are reminded of Porphyry’s immanent

and transcendent forms. Boethius claims:

For there are in fact two kinds or forms of

incorporeals. Some can exist apart from bodies, and

endure in the incorporeality separated from bodies… But

others, even though they are incorporeal, nevertheless

cannot exist apart from bodies. For instance, the line

or the surface, or number or single qualities—which,

although we declare them to be incorporeal since they

111 Boethius, 23.71


are not spread out in three dimensions at all,

nevertheless so exist in bodies that they cannot be torn

away or separated from them, or else if they are

separated from bodies, do not persist at all.112

If, therefore, the understanding abstracts this second type of

incorporeal from the corporeal which is given by perception, then

the abstraction of the form (the immanent form) from the matter in

perception is a division, and not “false” by Boethius’ argument.

That is, the abstracted form is not a false representation of the

thing. Our understanding of a universal, though it is not in our

understanding “mixed” in with a corporeal body (and is therefore

not a true description of the thing) is nevertheless not false,

although our conception of this incorporeal will be different from

how it subsists in a thing. Boethius gives the example of a line:

“Therefore, no one should say we are thinking falsely about the

line because we grasp it by the mind, as if it were beyond bodies,

even though it cannot exist beyond bodies.”113

The second type of incorporeal exists in one way in an object

and in another in perception. In this way genera and species are

allowed to be both singular and universal for Boethius, depending

on how they are approached: “it is universal in one way, when it

is thought, and singular in another, when it is sensed in the

things in which it has its being.”114 As a universal, it does not

exist in nature, yet something does: “For everything the mind

112 Boethius, 21.

113 Boethius, 24.

114 Boethius, 25.72


understands, it either intellectually conceives what exists

constituted in the nature of things, and describes it to itself by

reason, or else the mind paints for itself by empty imagination

what does not exist”;115 and, as we have already seen, the universal

is not imaginary. It is, rather, what the intellect abstracts from

the individual (the form-matter composite), which is distinct from

the form alone with regard to its mode of being.

It seems that Boethius has, in an attempt to defend the

intellect as something which does not fabricate its objects,

demanded that those objects be real; but if this were the case, we

would have to question why he uses the logical terms “truth” and

“falsity”. He distinguishes true from false cognition on the basis

that the abstraction of a form is a division of concepts, whereas

only a combination of concepts (“man runs”) can be false. If the

being he speaks of is only a concept, or a method of the mind to

categorize objects of different types, this being we do not think

of as real, as it is yet dependent on the existence of a subject.

Second IntentionsAccording to Pini: “From the middle of the thirteenth century

onwards, logic is described as a rational science concerned not

with language but with a special class of concepts, the so-called

second intentions.”116 The doctrine of second intentions from the

13th century shows a parallel with the discussions advanced one

thousand years before concerning the categories. In Giorgio Pini’s

115 Boethius, 20.

116 Pini, 27.73


Categories and Logic in Duns Scotus, he reviews the controversy over

intentions. Says Pini, “Everybody agrees that second intentions

are notions such as genus, species, definition, proposition, and syllogism, even

though there is some disagreement concerning individual and the

copula ‘is’.”117 What a second intention is, however, is not

consistent within the doctrine.

Pini cites examples of writers demonstrating the various

notions of the second intention, and consequently, the status of a

species or genus. Robert Kilwardby, for example, defines first

intentions as the things themselves, and second intentions as

their modes of being. Simon of Faversham and Radulphus Brito seem

to carry on this view with the notion of a second intention as the

comparison between two extramental things (these things being

first intentions).118 Pini cites Aquinas as contrary to this view,

in that first intentions (though Aquinas did not separate

intentions into “first” and “second”) are themselves concepts,

whereas second intentions would be reflections on those concepts.119

Giles of Rome explains that the intellect first understands an

object (first intention) and then reflects on an individual and

abstracts from it a universal (second intention).120 Peter of

Auvergne criticizes Aquinas with a new conception, that the second

intention is determined by the nature of things, and not by a

117 Pini, 31.

118 Pini, 48.

119 Pini, 48.

120 Pini, 63.74


secondary comprehension imposed upon things by the intellect.121

Duns Scotus asserts that the intellect causes a second intention

when it is confronted with a property of an essence: “For example,

an essence considered as universal has the property of being

predicable of individuals, and the intellect is moved by that

property to cause the intention species.”122 Each of these

definitions corresponds to a varying definition of an Aristotelian

category as a logical entity or a natural entity, a mental thing

or an extramental thing.

The ontological status of the categories is determined by the

varying authors’ conceptions of genera and species, which are

substances in the Categories. If genera and species are said to be

within the things themselves or are concepts for the intellect or

only linguistic, this determines the definition of the category

substance. As Pini states, “It is an old and revered opinion of

the Peripatetic school that the Categories is a logical treatise.”

This logical treatment means that the Categories was read as “the

science concerned with the way we understand the world, rather

than the study of the way the world is.’”123 Pini cites the rise of

interest in the Categories as a result of the Metaphysics becoming

121 Pini, 65. See also Pini, 55: “In its first act, directed towards extramental things, the intellect produces a concept to which there corresponds an extramental thing. Elsewhere Aquinas called this first concept ‘inner word’. This is what is generally called ‘first intention’.In its second act, which is directed towards the mode of understanding, the intellect produces a concept to which there corresponds an extramental thing as understood. This second is what is generally called ‘second intention’.”

122 Pini, 108.

123 Pini, 1.75


available around the end of the twelfth or the beginning of the

thirteenth centuries:124 “The knowledge of Aristotle’s Metaphysics

implied a new consideration of the Categories, since in the Metaphysics

Latin authors could find a treatment of categories partially

different from the one with which they were familiar in the

Categories.”125 This led to a popular opinion that Aristotle dealt

with the categories in two distinct ways: as beings and as modes

of comprehension or reasoning. If Aristotle was to have dealt with

categories in two ways, however, their ontological status remains

unclear. If they can be dealt with both as logical concepts and as

metaphysical entities, then we may be led to any of several

conclusions: that they are themselves extramental entities that

can be considered as objects of understanding, that they are modes

of comprehension that derive from the intellect alone which have

some relation to the extramental things (or not), or (Plotinus’

problem) that there must be something underlying both metaphysics

and logic to which the categories belong that allows them to be

“really” both metaphysical and logical, or that their ontological

status is neither exclusively metaphysical nor logical but that

(metaphysical) being and logical being co-exist without some

common “being substrate”. It is the relationship between concepts

and things that is being debated, by way of second intentions, “…

for it is insofar as second intentions are representations that

they are important to the doctrine of the logical study of

124 Actually, it is said to have resurfaced “Between the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth centuries”. Italics mine. Pini, 12.

125 Pini, 12.76


categories.”126 That is, if a category is said to be a

representation, this seems to indicate that a category is only a

mental entity.

Aquinas differentiates logic and metaphysics in the

aforementioned fashion and asserts that in the Categories, Aristotle

is speaking of logic. The corresponding view of genera and species

is that they are ‘intentions of universality’127 imposed on the

object by the intellect. The genus and species are therefore

instances of intentional being, which is a result of the acts of

the intellect alone, and therefore cannot be said to have ‘real’

being. As Pini explains: “Whereas intelligible species are real

qualities inhering in the mind, concepts or inner words are not

real being but enjoy a special kind of being, which is variously

called ‘intentional’, ‘mental’, and, especially after Aquinas,

‘objective’, which applies when something is considered as an

object of understanding.”128

In contrast to Aquinas, Radulphus Brito leans toward a

metaphysical interpretation, in that both first and second

intentions are based on the things themselves (in relation with

the intellect). Second intentions differ from first intentions

only in that “the former are taken from proper modes of being of

things, whereas the latter are taken from common or relative modes

of being.”129 Both are based directly on the real objects under

126 Pini, 47-8.

127 See Pini, 42.

128 Pini, 46.

129 Pini, 91.77


consideration, and both modes of understanding (e.g., particular

and universal) are real. While Brito does believe that some acts

of reasoning130 are responsible for some second intentions, simple

intentions such as the genus or species are real properties of

extramental things.131 The mode of being of a category is “both real

and rational, according to the way in which it is considered.”132

But if the mode of being depends on the way in which it is

considered, then its being depends on the intellect (and real as

well as rational become themselves modes of understanding).

However, “Categories, even when considered as rational beings,

have properties that are not caused by the intellect and do not

depend on their being understood.”133 Thus, a rational being is

dependent on (or even partially composed of) ‘real’ parts or

properties.

Duns Scotus admits that the categories can be considered both

logically and metaphysically, but that this does not signify their

being both real and logical entities.134 Duns Scotus, in his

consideration of second intentions, reports three distinct kinds

of being: “material, quidditative, and cognitive.”135 These

130 Propositions and syllogisms.

131 Pini, 96.

132 Pini, 154.

133 Pini, 156.

134 “Scotus maintains that categories can be considered in two ways, logically and metaphysically, and not that they are constituted by two ontological components.” Pini, 148.

135 Pini goes on to compare Scotus to Henry of Ghent: “His phrasing is close to Henry of Ghent’s distinction of natural being (esse naturae),

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correspond to three ways in which a universal term can be

considered: its material being is the mode in which it exists in

individuals; quidditative being is that of its essence; and

cognitive as it is an object of the intellect136--such as the

‘objective’ or ‘intentional’ being of Aquinas. While Scotus

assigns real being to an intelligible species (an object to-be-

understood) and to the intellectual act of understanding, the

object produced in such an act (the intentional object) is not

real.137 With regard to the categories, “Scotus maintains that

categories are the most basic types of essences but that Aristotle

does not present them as such in Cat. 4. Here categories are

considered as they are understood and as concepts.”138 Genus and

species, as secondary substances, are not in fact different from

primary substances, but are only different considerations of

substance. They are “intentional accidents”.139

We’ve seen in the preceding some discussion of the

categories, including ousia and Aristotelian relations, with regard

to how they exist. Reading the Categories without the Metaphysics might

being of the essence (esse essentiae), and rational being (esse rationis).” Pini, 103.

136 Pini, 101.

137 Pini, 106.

138 Pini, 186.

139 Pini, 191: “Scotus, as we have already seen, interprets the division between primary and secondary substances as a division of substance according to its intentional accidents. He maintains that by this division Aristotle only introduces two modes of considering a substance, not two kinds of substances.” Pini, 191.

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lead us to believe that a logical interpretation is adequate,

which could justify the assertion that the categories are products

of the subject—that they have only a mental existence. Plotinus

and some of the second intentions writers interpret the categories

as extramental—existing in nature, independent of the subject. But

overall the tendency amongst commentators, what Pini calls the

traditional Peripatetic view, is that the Categories is a logical

rather than a metaphysical work. If the Categories were a logical

work, it would make sense to ascribe only a logical (mental,

possibly non-real) existence to its subject matter. Since the

relation of consciousness to its object is included among the

categories (as a relation), this puts doubt into the idea that the

object of consciousness is in any way real. In my next chapter,

we’ll see how Brentano carried the mental inexistence of the

intentional object into his concept of intentionality.

The authors I’ll discuss in Chapter 4 deal with much the same

problem, of determining whether the object of intentional

consciousness is real or non-real. Intentionality, a relation in

the Aristotelian sense, is described by Brentano as equivalent to

the intentionality of scholastic writers. The object of

intentionality (where intentionality is a relation between subject

and object) is described by Husserl as non-real. Ingarden

contradicts the idea that the intentional object is not real,

using the example of the literary work of art. That intentionality

is real, as described by realist phenomenology, is a return to the

Aristotelian view considered in Chapter 1. In this chapter we have

seen how the Categories in isolation from the Metaphysics has come to

be thought of as describing only logical entities, rather than80


real entities considered logically (as Aristotle saw no great

distinction between entities and the language used to describe

them). In the next chapter, we’ll see a return to the realist

standpoint.

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Chapter 4:

From Brentano to Realist Phenomenology

In the last chapter we saw how Aristotle’s Categories came to be

thought of as a logical work, and how this encouraged the belief

that it treated concepts as exclusively logical entities that have

no real being outside of the subject. This interpretation was

carried over by some of the second intentions authors, who termed

the intentional object mentally inexistent. The discussion of the

Medieval doctrine of second intentions should provide introduction

to Brentano’s later work, with regard to his adoption of the

mental inexistence of the intentional object.

In this chapter I will outline major phenomenological concepts of

intentionality from Brentano to current realist phenomenology. As

we will see, Brentano’s conception originates in his work on

Aristotle, and this fundamental tenet of phenomenology he

attributes to the Medieval (second intentions) thinkers.

Brentano’s psychological theory uses intentionality as the

differentiator between what he calls mental phenomena and physical

phenomena. While he believes in the real existence of the

categories, he does not believe that the relata to which

consciousness is related in intentionality need be real. Husserl,

Brentano’s student, differentiates himself from Brentano according

to the distinction between their respective fields, psychology and

phenomenology. In Husserl’s conception, as in Brentano’s,

intentionality is not “real” in the sense that the natural world

is real, but is a result of consciousness. Ingarden’s ontological

treatise focusing on the literary work of art contradicts previous

assumptions of intentional inexistence, for Ingarden maintains

that without intentional existence we must deny the existence of

such things as sentences and other, more complex, literary

constructs. These entities have, according to Ingarden, a

“general” existence. As we shall see, current realist

phenomenology explicitly ascribes reality to intentional being

alongside ideal and material being.

Franz Brentano (1838-1917)Franz Brentano wrote his doctoral dissertation on Aristotle,

entitled On the Several Senses of Being in Aristotle. Brentano attributes to

Aristotle four distinct types of being: “Being is a homonym. Its

several senses fit into the fourfold distinction of accidental

being, being in the sense of being true, being of the categories,

and potential and actual being.”140 The largest chapter of this

dissertation is devoted to the being of the Categories. In this

chapter, Brentano introduces three conceptions of the nature of

the categories. The first that he describes conceives of the

categories as a framework for concepts, comparable to the

linguistic significations of concepts I presented previously.141 The

second regards the categories as themselves concepts or

predicates, in the logical sense that they are parts of judgments

140? Brentano, On the Several Senses, 3.

141 The representatives of this conception Brentano lists are Brandis and Zeller. Brentano, On the Several Senses, 51.


(the highest predicates).142 The third regards the categories as

“the various highest concepts which are designated by the common

name being [on].”143 Brentano’s own view is, which he presents as

the first Thesis of the chapter, is that “The categories are not

merely a framework for concepts, but they are themselves real

concepts, extramental independent beings.” And he goes on to say,

in introducing the explanation of this thesis, that “This is

Aristotle’s opinion which he states clearly and repeatedly, so

much so that, as I said, I cannot believe that there are more than

verbal differences between his interpreters.”144 Brentano’s second

thesis argues that the ‘being’ of the categories (like the four

senses of being introduced at the beginning of this section) is

also homonymous in the sense that their being is a “unity of

analogy”.145 This unity of analogy means precisely that the being

which is expressed by each of the categories is unified in the

sense that other univocal terms are united; that is, if we say

that “walking is healthy” and that “Brentano is healthy”, the

univocal term “healthy” is used in two different ways. We may say

that they are used equivocally, but to say univocal stresses that

there is a common basis, a unity, in the usage of the term.

“Walking is healthy” expresses that walking is conducive to

142 Brentano cites Trendelenburg, Biese and Waitz as adherents of this view. Brentano, 52.

143 Bonitz, Ritter, Hegel. Brentano, On the Several Senses, 53.

144 Brentano, On the Several Senses, 56. Without specific textual references, we can at least say that Brentano’s confidence, demonstrated in the wording of this quotation, is convincing.

145 Brentano, On the Several Senses, 58.84


health, whereas “Brentano is healthy” expresses that Brentano is

in a healthy state. The verb “is” is used in two different senses.

And like other univocal terms, there is one primaryhealthon

which the other applications of the term depend. The categories

are, in fact, differentiated according to their mode of dependence

on substance, the primary term. The other nine depend on substance

and correspond to various manners of predication.

While a category has a corresponding manner of predication

for Brentano, not every predicate has the same type of being as a

category, for he differentiates between them according to the

subject. Predicates of primary substance, the categories, have

real being in that they refer to a real subject and its

properties. But Brentano speaks of another sort of predicate, that

which can only be predicated ‘of something’146 and which therefore

has being in the sense of being true only. He uses the phrase

‘second intentions’, a reference to the medieval doctrine, to

denote this type of thing, and examples of such predicates are

genera or any universal—thus ‘man’, predicated of Socrates, has

real being, but ‘man’ alone does not: “For example, I ask ‘What is

Socrates?’—‘A man’. ‘How tall is he?’—‘Five feet’. ‘What is he

like?’—‘White,’ etc. Here the question and answer have real

content, for the being of man, of five-footedness, of the white,

is real being.”147 Man considered as a genus, however, is a second

intention and does not have ‘real’ being: “The definition as

definition, the genus as genus, in general, the universal as such

146 That which can be said of a subject but is not in a subject, as in theCategories, e.g., ‘man’.



do not exist outside the abstracting understanding and so the two-

footed animal as definition does not exist in things and is as such

second intention, and all of them merely have being in the sense

of being true.”148 The judgment corresponding to the definition

“two-footed animal” is “Man is a two-footed animal”. The subject

of this proposition is not a primary substance, and so as such is

only a ‘something’. This is again an instance of an ‘intentional

being’ which is said not to be ‘real’, in the sense that it comes

from the intellect and is not in the individual (or primary

substance).

Brentano refers to second intentions explicitly in Psychology

from an Empirical Standpoint, this time directly crediting the

Scholastics, where he attempts to discern a defining

characteristic of mental phenomena as distinct from physical. He

says,

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, 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 judgment something is affirmed or denied, in love

loved, in hate hated, in desire desired and so on.149

Mental phenomena are perceived, according to Brentano, in ‘inner

perception’. “Inner perception possesses another distinguishing

characteristic: its immediate, infallible self-evidence.”150 Mental

phenomena, therefore, have being in the sense of being true.

Brentano brings another level to this statement, however, and

mental phenomena become the only things which may be said to be

true: “it is really the only perception in the strict sense of the

word. As we have seen, the phenomena of the so-called external

perception cannot be proved true and real even by means of

indirect demonstration.”151 But truth and reality are very different

concepts for Brentano.

In the 1911 edition of Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint,

Brentano includes an appendix entitled “Supplementary Remarks

Intended to Explain and Defend, as well as to Correct and Expand

upon the Theory”. Here Brentano notes the correlation between his

notion of intentionality and an Aristotelian relation:

149 Brentano, PES, 88. Compare this to Categories 7: “There are, moreover, other relatives, e.g. habit, disposition, perception, knowledge, and attitude. The significance of all these is explained by a reference to something else and in no other way. Thus, a habit is a habit of something, knowledge is knowledge of something, attitude is the attitude of something. So it is with all other relatives that have been mentioned.Those terms, then, are called relative, the nature of which is explained by reference to something else, the preposition 'of' or some other preposition being used to indicate the relation.”


151 Brentano, PES, 91.87


What is characteristic of every mental activity is, as I

believe I have shown, the reference to something as an

object. In this respect, every mental activity seems to

be something relational. And in fact, where Aristotle

enumerates the various main classes of his category of

[relation] he mentions mental reference.152

The defining difference between intentionality and a relation

is, according to Brentano, that the intentionality of

consciousness does not necessarily refer to something real. In his

conception, the fundament is that which is directed towards an

object, and the terminus is that object to which it is directed.

Only the fundament need be real for Brentano: “In other relations

both termsboth the fundament and the terminusare real, but here

only the first termthe fundamentis real.”153

Specifically, Brentano denies any real existence to ideal

entities such as universals. To do this, he must claim an

equivocation between “being” and “existence”.

As far as universals are concerned, the assumption that

they have being is just as absurd as the assumption that

they exist, for it leads to contradictions. And the law

of contradiction not only denies that the same thing can

both exist and not exist at the same time but also that

the same thing can be and not be at the same time.154



154 Brentano, PES, 274-5.88


Here Brentano’s argument seems to rely on the assumption that a

thing can “be” in only one way. Boethius made sense of the being

of a universal using a mode of being which is only gained through

the abstraction of a universal from its object. That is, the

universal was said to exist in one way in the object and in

another way in cognition. Brentano’s counterargument seems to be

that if the universal does not exist in the object, the universal

does not exist in the mind either. It has, for him, mental-

inexistence; the object of the intentionality of consciousness is

not real.

We must keep in mind, however, that most things we consider

to be “real” are not so for Brentano. As we saw above, the objects

of external perception, for Brentano, are unprovable “even by

means of indirect demonstration”. There are two possible

assumptions to make, then, in the absence of proof. We can assume

that we perceive extramental things correctly, or we can assume

that we do not. Brentano seems to prefer the latter, and he even

seems to discourage making the former assumption (that we do, in

fact, perceive the external), when he states, “Anyone who in good

faith has taken them for what they seem to be is being misled by

the manner in which the phenomena are connected.”155

Brentano, responsible for one of the basic tenets of

phenomenology with regard to intention, has here diverged from

Aristotle in that he believes consciousness, while a relation in

the Aristotelian sense, differs from other relations in that the

intentional object is said not to be real. In the following

sections, I’ll be examining how intentionality has developed as a155 Brentano, PES, 91.

89


phenomenological concept through Husserl, Ingarden, and in more

recent literature. It seems a natural progression, and I rely

heavily on the authors I mention rather than attempt to reinvent

their conclusions.

Edmund Husserl (1859-1938)Husserl follows Brentano in asserting that the only absolute

existent156 is the subject, but he wishes to reframe the problem

within the confines of his transcendental phenomenology. He

differentiates himself from Brentano157 who, as a psychologist,

156 “Absolute existent” is Husserl’s term. As we saw earlier, Brentano declared that the intentional object does not exist in any real sense.

157 “There is still one point that calls for a remark. In the eyes of those who set aside the phenomenological reduction as a philosophically irrelevant eccentricity (whereby, to be sure, they destroy the whole meaning of the work and of my phenomenology), and leave nothing remainingbut an a priori psychology, it often happens that this residual psychology is identified as to its main import with Franz Brentano’s psychology of intentionality. Great indeed as is the respect and gratitude with which the author remembers this gifted thinker as his teacher, and strongly convinced as he is that his conversion of the scholastic concept of intentionality into a descriptive root-concept of psychology constitutes a great discovery, apart from which phenomenology could not have come into being at all; none the less we must distinguish as essentially different the author’s pure psychology implicitly contained in this transcendental phenomenology and the psychology of Brentano.” Husserl, Ideas, 23. We must note, however, that Husserl repeats again and again that not all consciousness is intentional; for there are objects of whichwe are conscious which are not the object of our intention or, as Husserlterms it, the “glancing ray of the pure Ego” (Husserl, Ideas, 243). In addition to intentional objects, there exists a background (in the field of perception, for instance), which represents potential intentional objects. These are not properly objects of consciousness, as they are notthe focal point of perception, yet we are “aware” of them: “For it is easily seen that not every real phase of the concrete unity of an intentional experience has itself the basic character of intentionality, the property of being a ‘consciousness of something’,” (Husserl, Ideas, 120). Here Husserl is

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attempted to ascertain the psychological connection between the

subject and intentional objects, but Husserl asserts that his is

an entirely different project.

As we saw earlier, Brentano states that there is a “quasi-

relation” between the subject and the intentional object such

that, unlike Aristotelian relations, only one of the relatives

must be real (for Brentano, the intentional object need not be).

We can immediately compare Brentano’s attribution of truth to only

mental phenomena with this statement from Husserl’s Introduction

to Ideas, which speaks of both the directedness of consciousness

and the status of the ‘real’ world:

Posited as real (wirklich), I am now no longer a human Ego

in the universal, existentially posited world, but

exclusively a subject for which this world has being and

purely, indeed, as that which appears to me, is presented

to me, and of which I am conscious in some way or other,

so that the real being of the world thereby remains

unconsidered.158

Later in the work, Husserl notes that the “real being” of the

world is not only unconsidered and unquestioned, but it cannot be

said to have any existence at all: “Reality is not in itself

something absolute, binding itself to another only in a secondarydifferentiating between “consciousness of” and “awareness of”, on the basis that “consciousness of” is only possible when the intentional object is the focus of attention. Not all intentional experience has the basic character of intentionality, because “The stream of experience can never consist wholly of focal actualities,” (Husserl, Ideas, 118).

158 Husserl, Ideas, 8.

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way, it is, absolutely speaking, nothing at all, it has no

‘absolute essence’ whatsoever, it has the essentiality of

something which in principle is only intentional, only known,

consciously presented as an appearance.”159

Husserl goes on to clarify that the transcendental subject is

the only thing which may be said to have “Absolute Being”,160 a

being which is non-relative, or relative only to itself. By

“Absolute Being”, Husserl means that the transcendental subject,

unlike the “real” world, does not depend on anything else for its

being: “Thus no real thing, none that consciously presents and

manifests itself through appearances, is necessary for the Being of

consciousness itself (in the widest sense of the stream of

experience).”161 Since the real world exists for this transcendental

subject, it exists relatively.162 The existence of the real world is

indubitable, Husserl states, but phenomenological considerations

have led him to the conclusion that its existence is relative to

the only absolutely existent, transcendental subjectivity.163 This

assertion is a result of Husserl’s system of phenomenological

reduction, at the end of which he concludes that the

transcendental subject is the only real existent. These159 Husserl, Ideas, 154.

160 Ingarden defines absolute being as an object that is “at once autonomous, existentially original, separate, and self-dependent in an absolute sense… But, if in its mode of being, an object displays even oneopposition to any of these existential moments, then its being is relative.” Ingarden, TMB, 92



163 Husserl, Ideas, 21.92


considerations do differ from Brentano’s project; Husserl does not

intend to determine the relationship between the mental and the

physical, as he states:

We must, however, be quite clear on this point that there

is no question here of a relation between a psychological eventcalled

experience (Erlebnis)and some other real existent (Dasein)called

Objector of a psychological connexion obtaining between the

one and the other in objective reality. On the contrary, we are

concerned with experiences in their essential purity.164

Objects of phenomenological study are to be “purified” of any

attributes which would define them as in any way “real”. What

Husserl means by “reality” is unclear; the “reality” of an object

seems to be determined by its existing in the world, or in

objective reality, which Husserl seems to assume is the same as

existing in material reality.

The phenomena of transcendental phenomenology will be characterized as

non-real (irreal). Other reductions, the specifically

transcendental, “purify” the psychological phenomena

from that which lends them reality, and therewith a

setting in the real “world”. Our phenomenology should be

a theory of essential Being, dealing not with real, but

with transcendentally reduced phenomena.165

Clearly Husserl does not intend to disregard the immaterial,

however, for the transcendental subject is both immaterial and the164 Husserl, Ideas, 119-20.

165 Husserl, Ideas, 44.93


only absolute existent. But he assumes there exists a variance

between things as they are and things as they are experienced. At

some points, Husserl seems to give intentional experience a

reality which cannot be said of anything corporeal; he writes, for

example: “All corporeally given thing-like entities can also not be, no corporeally given

experiencing can also not be.”166 As we saw earlier, the objects of

consciousness are “only intentional”, or “only known”; that is, they

are not real. This and other textual evidence has led me to assume

that, for Husserl, real is equivalent to material.

Jeff Mitscherling provides a concise summary of the Husserl

relevant to my discussion in Roman Ingarden’s Ontology and Aesthetics. The

real world and its objects are not the proper subject of matter of

phenomenology, as they are ‘transcendent’ to the acts of

consciousness: “Only the intentional correlates of the acts are to

be scrutinized, and these are discovered, claims Husserl, to

derive their ontic foundation from pure consciousness alone.”167

Here the intentional correlates of the acts of consciousness are

those things which are consciousness’ objects—not the thing as it

exists, but the thing as it exists for consciousness. The

significance of this for Husserl is that the thing existing for

consciousness cannot derive its being from a real or ideal entity.

As Mitscherling states, “Ingarden reads Husserl as proceeding on

the basis of a number of assumptions taken over from formal

ontology, two of which are: (1) a unity may be comprised only of

parts that have the same essence, and (2) consciousness, the real


167 Mitscherling, Roman Ingarden, 82.94


world, and ideal objects have different essences.”168 Given these

assumptions, the thing as it exists for consciousness is only that: the purely

intentional object. This is the basis of Husserl’s transcendental-

phenomenological idealism.

Where Brentano was attempting to do empirical psychology,

Husserl has outlined a doctrine of intentionality for

phenomenology. Again we see a consciousness related to a world,

and the assertion that the world of consciousness cannot be

considered real: as for Husserl, consciousness (experience) has no

absolute essence. Rather, the object of consciousness has the same

essence or type of being as consciousness, and therefore the

object of consciousness is not the same as any object in the

external material world. In the next section, we’ll see Ingarden

argue against this assumption with the idea of heteronomous

beingone thing can have two types of being. A unity need not be

composed of parts having the same essence. This notion will later

be revised, as it is misleading to think of parts “having” being

rather than, as we saw with Aristotle, a thing that is defined by

its multiple activities of being.

Roman Ingarden (1893-1970) Roman Ingarden attempted to provide a theory contrary to Husserl’s

transcendental idealism by questioning some of Husserl’s basic

assumptions. Ingarden’s concept of heteronomous being directly

contradicts the first assumption of formal ontology just cited

(that a unity must be comprised of parts of the same essence);

though objects exemplifying heteronomous being are neither168 Mitscherling, Roman Ingarden, 62.

95


“autonomous” nor “existentially original”, they do exist

“generally”, and this is the mode of being of the intentional

object. Real (material) and ideal objects, however, exist

autonomously; that is, contrary to Husserl, Ingarden did not

believe that real (material) or ideal entities depended on

consciousness for their existence. Rather, the intentional object,

as heteronomous, depends on the ideal and the material for its

existence. As Mitscherling explains:

(1) First… Husserl denied existentially autonomous

status to the objects of the real worldhe denied, in

other words, ‘in itself’ existence to objects

‘transcendent’ to the act of consciousness,

maintaining that this transcendence is itself a

‘character of being’ immanent to consciousness. (2) A

second, corollary, claim is that the objects of the

real world are purely intentional objects. (3) His

third claim is that the latter find their ontic basis

in pure consciousness alonethat is, the purely

intentional object is identified as the noematic

correlate of the act of consciousness, the structure

of this correlate, like that of the entire act itself,

ultimately deriving exclusively from the pure

consciousness (or pure ego qua conscious activity)

itself. Ingarden’s realist rejoinder to the idealist

position entailed in these claims attempts to

reinstate the existentially autonomous status of both

‘real’ and ‘ideal’ objects, refusing to grant the

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Husserlian claim that these sorts of objects find

their ontic basis in pure consciousness.169

By contrast to the autonomous real and ideal objects, “the

purely intentional object is existentially heteronomous; it is

neither existentially autonomous nor existentially original.”170

These classifications (heteronomous, originality, etc.) are

necessary for a general introduction to Ingarden and his revisions

to Husserl’s transcendental idealism; they require further

discussion if we are to adequately explain Ingarden’s notion of

intentionality and the intentional object, as is my intent.

Ingarden describes these conceptsexistential autonomy,

heteronomy, originality and derivationin Time and Modes of Being.171

These concepts are arise naturally out of the definitions of

ideal, material and intentional being.

Autonomy of being, according to Ingarden, means that a thing

is self-existentits being does not depend on anything else; if,

however, the “foundation of its being is not in itself, but in

something else”, it is heteronomous.172 Ingarden uses the example of

redness itself versus redness in a thing to illustrate this

169 Mitscherling, Roman Ingarden, 84.

170 Mitscherling, Roman Ingarden, 92.

171 This work is an English translation of parts of Controversy Over the Existence of the World. While it introduces concepts of being, much of the resolution to the book’s main problem remains obscure, which problem Ingarden states in TMB as: “whether the real world should be regarded as‘existentially independent’ of pure consciousness, as ‘existentially dependent’ upon it, or whether its existence should be denied altogether.” TMB, 28.

172 Ingarden, TMB, 43.97


difference: “Red is simply redness itself and constitutes itself. Only

of a pure ideal quality may one say that it is completely and exclusively

itself without anything else whatever participating in its being and

in that which it is, or its participating in anything else

whatever.”173 Redness itself and ideal qualities in general are

therefore autonomous in Ingarden’s view. Redness in a thing,

however, is a concretization of this ideal redness and, as a

quality of a material thing, depends on that thing for its

existence. Redness in a thing is that inseparable incorporeal

being (recall Boethius) that depends on both the existence of the

thing and the existence of the ideal quality for its being. Ideal

elements are one of the three ontic bases of the work of art. In

the formation of a sentence as well as in the reading of a

sentence, the reproduction of its meaning depends on references to

autonomous ideal elements. Without autonomous ideal elements, it

would be “impossible to achieve between two conscious subjects

genuine linguistic communication, in which both sides would

apprehend an identical meaning content of the sentences

exchanged.”174 That is, communication is possible only if the ideal

elements of language are identical to a multitude of conscious

subjects.

A second ontic basis of the work of art, also real and

autonomous, is the material aspect, “the real (graphic) material

constituting the material ontic basis of the written word signs.”175

173 Ingarden, TMB, 46.

174 Ingarden, LWA, 364.

175 Mitscherling, Roman Ingarden, 154. As stated by Ingarden: “In some real, fixed, relatively little-changeable material, the ‘letters’ must be

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This is the text by which the work of art is distributed, the

phonemes that constitute the words written, and the letters that

make up those word sounds, whereas the ideal element of the word

is its meaning. The autonomy of the material basis of the literary

work of art is what most obviously makes Ingarden’s criticisms of

Husserl ‘realistic’, according to Mitscherling. “But by far the

more significant and powerful feature of his realism lies in his

insistence upon the ontically autonomous existence of ideal

concepts, essences, and ideas, for it was in Husserl’s rejection

of their ontically autonomous existence that Ingarden located what

he regarded as his teacher’s greatest error.”176 The autonomy of the

material ontic basis, however, establishes a material world

independent of the existence of conscious subjects and signifies a

reversal of the Husserlian ontological tenet that the world is

constituted by consciousness. With regard to the literary work of

art, the material stratum provides a foundation for all other

strata; while the ideal does not depend on the material for its

existence, its communication via a work of art does. As Ingarden

states:

The phonetic stratum, and in particular the manifold of

word sounds, forms the external, fixed shell of the

literary work, in which all the remaining strata find

their external point of support orif one willtheir

established as signals for the use of corresponding word sounds. It is this appropriately formed real material which, along with subjective operations, ideal concepts, essences, and ideas, makes up the third, eventhough indirect, ontic basis of the literary work.” Ingarden, LWA, 367.



external expression. The constitutive foundation proper

of the individual literary work certainly lies in the

stratum of meaning units of a lower and higher order.

But the meanings are essentially bound to the word sounds.177

The third ontic foundation of the work of art is the

intentional. According to Ingarden, the foundation of the being of

a purely intentional object is the intentional act; that is,

consciousness creates the intentional object by acting

intentionallythe directedness of consciousness towards an object

makes it an intentional object. The intentional object, dependent

on the intentional act for its being, is not autonomous; the

intentional act cannot create anything self-existent. Therefore

the intentional object is heteronomous. With regard to the

(intentional) literary work of art, it is dependent on all of the

word sounds and their graphic representation, their ideal

meanings, and the synthesis of meanings in a sentence, paragraph

or novel.

In addition to being heteronomous, the intentional object can

also be derivative (as opposed to original): “it is such that it

can exist only when it is produced by another object,”178 or whose

“immediate existential foundation is in another existentially

heteronomous object.”179 Derivative intentional objects depend for

their existence on another intentional objectfor instance,

elements of a sentence which are dependent upon the sentence for



179 Ingarden, TMB, 51.100


their existence, as in a literary work. Ingarden lists people,

things, animals, and events as this kind of derivative intentional

object.180 These things that are referred to in a literary work of

art are neither real nor ideal objects; the language used to refer

to them is not referencing an autonomous being outside itself, but

a derivative intentional object dependent upon the sentence itself

for existence. The sentence is a result of the sentence-creating

act of the subject and is therefore itself an intentional object,

yet it is the sentence that determines the derivative intentional

objects of its content. As Mitscherling explains,

We call this content, which is constructed out of a

number of word meanings, a functional-intentional unit of

meaning. It is ‘intentional’ in that it points to

something other than itself; it indicates its

‘intentional correlate’, generally a state of affairs.

It is ‘functional’ in that it performs the function of

determining those particular functions that the word

meanings contained in it must in turn perform if they

are to be its components.181

The existence of a sentence is one of the greatest counter-

examples to a dualist (or reductionist) ontological system. The

sentence is neither ideal nor material, but depends upon both; it

is heteronomous. That is, the sentence




exists as an ontically heteronomous formation that has

the source of its existence in the intentional acts of

the creating conscious subject and, simultaneously, the

basis of its existence in two entirely heterogeneous

objectivities: on the one hand, in ideal concepts and

ideal qualities (essences), and, on the other hand—as we

shall see—in real “word signs”.182

Contrary to Husserl’s formal ontological assumption,

therefore, a sentence is a unity comprised of parts of various

essencesit depends on the material and the ideal, as well as the

intentional act of a conscious subject. This is proof for Ingarden

that something can be both heteronomous and “generally” existing:

“Anyone who is inclined to accept only ontically autonomously real

or ideal objectivities must, for the sake of consistency, doubt

the existence of sentences (and, by extension, sentence complexes,

theories, literary works).”183 The possibility that something could

exist and yet not be real arises as a result of the equivocation

of “real” and “material”. As Ingarden says, “However unlikely it

is that it [a sentence] will be found in the real world as a

reality, it cannot be denied that generally it has an existence.”184 A

general existence is still an existence and, for realist

phenomenology, a real existence.



184 Ingarden, TMB, 33. Ingarden continues: “non-existence (nonbeing) is not a mode, but the absence of any being.”

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In this section I have discussed various concepts which are

necessary to the reader if we are to move forward. With regard to

my overall argument, I consider most of what’s said here to be

work already done. Revisions are necessary to some of the

terminology that Ingarden usesfor example, that the intentional

object has a “general” existence whereas I would say “real”, and

the confusion between “real” and “material”. Contrary to what I’ve

quoted from Ingarden directly above, I am, in fact, very likely to

find a sentence in the real world, in realityin texts, in

conversation, in thought. It is only unlikely that I will find a

material sentence.

Current Realist PhenomenologyMy examination of the concept of intentional being as it has

existed since Aristotle ends with current realist phenomenology.

My best source for this section is Jeff Mitscherling, whose work

on Ingarden we have already encountered in the previous section.

Whereas we saw that Ingarden ascribed a “general” existence to

works of art, sentence complexes, and other examples of

intentional being, Mitscherling asserts that this “general”

existence is real. “Real” is distinguished from “material” and

comes to mean that which can be found in the natural worldnot all

that exists in nature is material.

The three ontic bases of the work of art which we encountered

in Ingarden represent, for Mitscherling, three types of being of

the natural world, and all of them are undoubtedly “real”.

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Contrary to what Boethius states about being (that it is just a

name applied to the various categories), ideal, material and

intentional being are not only names. But we must note that this

does not mean that there is a general “being” over and above these

three types that unites them. “Being is not merely some abstract

concept… [the three kinds of being] are nevertheless entirely real

and non-abstract in their existence (as material entities), their

being (as ideal entities), or their subsistence (as intentional

entities).”185 Here “material”, “ideal” and “intentional” are not

qualifiers added onto a general “being”, but to say that something

is “being” is to say that it is just being what it is, and it does

this materially, ideally, or intentionally. A thing can also

exhibit combinations of these types of being, as we saw in

Ingarden’s criticism of Husserl’s formal ontological assumption.

An example of something being intentionally is consciousness:

“Consciousness doesn’t ‘really’ exist at any given moment: it

consists in the activity of a peculiar relating to one another of

entities—or more precisely, it subsists in and throughout that

activity of relating.”186 A passage from Brentano I cited earlier

had him clearly claim that the intentional correlate, the object

to which consciousness directs its intentionality, does not

necessarily exist. He differentiated this from an Aristotelian

view of relation, where both relatives must exist in order for

there to be a relation. In the realist phenomenological

conception, intentional (or directional) consciousness, which is a

185 Mitscherling, Aes Gen 42.

186 Mitscherling, Aes Gen 80.104


relation, does not indicate that either the “mind” or

“consciousness” or the intentional correlate exists prior to the

intentional act, but that the intentional act is logically prior

to the intentional correlate as well as the conscious subject.

Mitscherling states this reversal succinctly as his New Copernican

Hypothesis: “I suggest a reversal of the common statement of the

most fundamental tenet of phenomenology—namely, that all

consciousness is intentional (that is, directed toward an object).

I suggest, rather, that intentionality (i.e., directionality)

gives rise to consciousness.”187

Phenomenological realism goes further than Ingarden’s claim

regarding the real foundation of the literary work of art (that an

intentional entity depends for its existence on the real).

Intentional objects also subsist independently of consciousness,

and it is on the basis of intentional structures in the natural

world that consciousness exists, and that there is such a thing as

an object. Prior to either the consciousness or the “real” object

is the intentional act, out of which they both arise, none being

any less real than any other. Intentions are not imposed on

objects by the mind.

The claim is not that there exists a ‘real’ world apart

from consciousness, and that the objects of this ‘real’

world impact upon consciousness in the manner of187 Mitscherling, Aes Gen 7. See also p. 72: “Intentionality, that is to say, subsists independently of the human mind. The operations of the mind, as operations of consciousness, are indeed characterized by intentionality, but this intentionality does not derive from the mind or consciousness. Our mind becomes conscious when it operates intentionally,and it does so by engaging with the intentional structures of the world of which it is a part.”

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efficient causality. Rather, the claim of realist

phenomenology is that the act of consciousness itself

consists in the mutual creation of its two poles: the

subject and the object of the act of consciousness both

arise within and as constitutive elements of the act

itself.188

The fundamental tenets of realist phenomenology speak to a

grounding of intentional existence in the natural world, which is

(summarily) a return to the Aristotelian doctrine of forms, that

second type of incorporeal which was apparent in the literature of

late antiquity. Mitscherling sets out two fundamental assumptions

of realist phenomenology:

Realist phenomenology, as I conceive and pursue it here,

is fundamentally committed to: (i) the independent

existence of a real world—that is, a world that exists

independently of human consciousness; and (ii) the

independent subsistence, within that world, of

intentional entities—that is, entities that possess

intentional being, such as ‘forms’.189

We can discern the realist phenomenological solution to the

problems plaguing the treatment of second intentions writers by of

the thirteenth century. Whereas their debate centred on whether

these intentions are mental or extramental, the distinction itself

becomes absurd from a realist phenomenological standpoint. The

188 Mitscherling, Aes Gen, 81.

189 Mitscherling, Aes Gen, 30.106


genus exists intentionally; in so far as the “extramental” is said

to have the genus within itself, it is also existing

intentionally, and insofar as the “mind” is said to impose the

genus upon the sensible individual, it is also only engaging with

the intentional genus. Also Boethius’ problem of the form being at

once universal and particular comes to make sense: if perception

is to receive the enmattered form (recall the two types of

incorporeals) without the matter, then it is not that the form has

jumped out of the thing into the mind and become universal, but

that the form exists intentionally190 and is responsible for both

the form in the matter and the form experienced by consciousness:

If we’re looking at the same table, in one sense (the

material sense) there are two different concepts, for

there are two different materially separate organisms

engaged in their respective activities. But in another

sense (the formal sense) there is only one concept, for

it is the same identical concept that is informing both

activities as percept. (And the same identical form

structures the object as we are perceiving it.)191

I have attempted in these past two chapters to trace the concept

of intentional being, beginning with Aristotle’s commentators and

ending with the current conception, where the concepts I have

190 “In cases where the form is identical with the idea—as in the case of numbers, for example—the form enjoys ideal being. In cases where the formis that of an organic unity—in which the form consists in the relation ofparts in an organic whole—it enjoys ‘intentional being’.” Mitscherling, Aes Gen, 20.

191 Mitscherling, Aes Gen, 179.107


outlined in Chapter 1 on Aristotle have returned, under somewhat

varied terminology, after the divergence we saw from commentators

I noted in Chapter 3. Current realist phenomenology defends not

only the real subsistence of the intentional object, but also that

the intentional object is the formal reality Aristotle had

originally conceived, and on which earlier phenomenology did not

focus. Intentional being, as it is currently conceived, is a type

of incorporeal being, where being is thought of as an activity

rather than a substance. Intentional forms are those responsible

for organic unity, perception and cognition. As intentional, they

exist in nature, come into being, and pass away. In the next

chapter, I will take the example of habit, which has intentional

existence, and use it to illustrate the dependence of intentional

being on material being.

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Chapter 5:

Intentional Habits and their Material

Dependence

What I have written above has established a more or less clear

definition of a type of being which current realist phenomenology

terms “intentional”. This type of being has been described as

having characteristics of ideal being, in that it exists

incorporeally and is often associated with “meaning” (though where

ideal meaning is fixed, intentional meaning is not), as well as

“real” being as Ingarden uses the word (as in “material”, or

capable of coming into being and being destroyed). While these two

types of being are said to be autonomous, intentional being is

not; it depends on both material and ideal being. As exemplified

in the case of a sentence that depends on graphic word signs for

its communication as well as the ideal meanings of individual

words, intentional being is dependent.

In this chapter I intend to describe a habit in the context

of realist phenomenology as something which exists intentionally.

This particular example will allow me to explicate the material

dependence of an intentional structure to a greater extent than

what is garnered from the examination of a work of art. The

literary work of art depends for its existence on the material

text for its communication and for its continued existence; it

seems that we must admit that were all of the copies of a

particular literary work to be destroyed, the intentional work of

art itself would also be destroyed; but as we have seen, the work

of art is not any of its particular material instances. A habit,

however, seems to exhibit a greater material dependence in that

its formation depends on specific material formations in the world of

the subject, as does the potential for the future activation of

the habitI cannot form the habit of always using my favourite red

pen unless that particular red pen exists. While the literary work

of art exhibits a similar material dependence, it seems that any

material text should embody the work of art. That is, with respect

to the material dependence of a work of art, it is a potentiality

for actualizing the workthe work does not depend on the

particular atoms of a particular stack of paper. A habit, in the

sense in which we usually take the word, depends upon specific

material entities; for instance, I can develop the habit of using

my copy of Faust to correct a wobbly table leg.

As we shall see, a habit can be defined in various senses; a

law of nature can be described as a habit (as a particular

reaction to a set of natural circumstances) as well as can the

tendency of an individual to attempt to solve a problem in a

particular (learned) fashion. Thus the example of a habit

emphasizes the extent to which intentional being pervades the

natural world; it is not the solution to a particular problem in

one field of inquiry but rather many. All of the examples I

provided in my introductory chapter can be considered habit, as

the underlying cause of a particular eventa natural entity

abiding by natural law, an action whose cause is personality,

language in the sense that its rules are not even considered in

conscious thought. Habit is neither a “mental” phenomenon nor an


“extramental” phenomenon but exhibits itself in both; this should

emphasize that the distinction itself is misleadingto ascribe

intentionality to both the mental and extramental diminishes the

validity of Brentano’s distinction between mental and physical

phenomena.

The only author I will cite whose work explicitly endorses

such a thing as “intentional being” is Jeff Mitscherling. While

the other authors I cite (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Rupert Sheldrake

and William James) deal explicitly with habit, none of them

ascribes to it any particular mode of being. It will, however,

become evident through an examination of their work that such a

type of being is necessary as an ontological basis. It will also

become evident that, through their analyses, several common themes

can be found: the effect of repeated action as the forging of a

path or an extension of something pre-existing; a habit’s

dependence upon the material (of the environment as well as the

subject who enacts it); and the impossibility of the existence of

the habit being explained in objective, material terms. At points

we will see a distinction between a habit (which we tend to

attribute to a subject) and that which a subject becomes

habituated to: an object, the world, a work of art, etc. This

distinction points to metaphysical implications that cannot be

included in this work, but are certainly a topic for further

study.

We should note at this point the relation between habit and

the work of art. In Merleau-Ponty’s conception of habit, a habit

is the alteration of the phenomenal body to something outside of

itself, in that the object becomes part of the phenomenal bodynot112


in any material sense, of course, but both existing intentionally.

The object is something which we have become familiar enough with

to not consider the intricacies of its userather we simply use

it. It becomes an extension of the function of our living body. He

says of the body: “The body is to be compared, not to a physical

object, but rather to a work of art. In a picture or a piece of

music the idea is incommunicable by means other than the display

of colours and sounds.”192 In the same sense, the material of the

body communicates a habit and, in this sense, it is dependent upon

it. We can also note a correlation in the description of habit and

the work of art with regard to the forging of a path, for example

in Jeff Mitscherling’s The Author’s Intention: “Both the author and the

reader follow what is essentially the same path of

intentionality.”193 This correlation between habit and the work of

art is, I think, indicative of the appropriateness of the

progression from Ingarden’s work on the literary work of art to

current realist phenomenological conceptions of intentional being,

which include habit. This also gives us our first analogical

implication between the work of art and a habit, in that, says

Merleau-Ponty: “the poem is not independent of every material aid,

and it would be irrevocably lost if its text were not preserved

down to the last detail. Its meaning is not arbitrary and does not

dwell in the firmament of ideas: it is locked in the words printed

192

? Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 174.

193 Mitscherling, Jeff, Aref Nayed & Tanya DiTommaso. The Author’s Intention, Lexington Books: Toronto; 2004, 115.

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on some perishable page.”194 Habits, too, are dependent upon some

material formation, but, as with the work of art, they cannot be

equated with their material instantiation.

The Dependence of Habit on the Material Structure of the

SubjectIn this section I turn for guidance to the chapter on “Habit” in

William James’ Principles of Psychology. James stresses the unconscious

nature of a habit, saying “habit diminishes the conscious attention with which

our acts are performed.” 195 What we see from this assertion is that a

habit is not simply the ability of the subject to accomplish a

series of conscious acts with greater speed; rather, the habit is

unconscious and, in fact, often governs the path of thoughts of

which we are aware. We cannot say, however, that the habit was

always unconscious; rather, a series of actions, performed

consciously, through repetition become unconscious.

Eliminating conscious thought as the stimulus for progression

through a series of steps (that are habitual), James requires

another type of stimuli to activate this progression, and this he

attributes to sensation: “In action grown habitual, what

instigates each new muscular contraction to take place in its

appointed order is not a thought or perception, but the sensation

occasioned by the muscular contraction just finished.”196 If we are to say,

194 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 175.

195 James, William, The Principles of Psychology. William Benton: Toronto; 1952, 74. Italics his.

196 Ibid., 75. Italics his.114


however, that sensations become habitually associated, then the

question arises of where the habit exists. We could say that it is

in the muscles themselves, each muscle being affected by those

surrounding, or we may say that the movement stimulates a reaction

in the brain that in turn signals another muscle to contract.

Either way, we must admit that the effect of habitual motion

creates as well as instigates changes in the material composition

of the subject.

But, we must ask, how is it that this material is altered?

For we cannot discern the habit itself as existing materially.

Rather, it would have to exist in the arrangement of materials

and, as an arrangement, be not material itself but only the form

of the material arrangement. James describes this form as a path:

“For, of course, a simple habit, like every other nervous

eventthe habit of snuffling, for example, or of putting one’s

hands into one’s pockets, or of biting one’s nailsis,

mechanically, nothing but a reflex discharge; and its anatomical

substratum must be a path in the system.”197 We therefore must

consider the system itself. A system in which a habit can exist

must be one that is capable of rearrangement, and a particular

rearrangement suitable to the particular habit at that. It may

seem an obvious conclusion that habitual motion of the human body

depends on possible motion of the human body, yet this is one of

the ways in which habit depends on the material. In addition,

these possible motions must be capable of being associated. James

suggests that this is due to the plastic structure of the organic

material of which we are composed; in current cognitive science,197 Ibid., 70.

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it is specifically the capability of neural tissue to form

synaptic connections that intends to supply the explanation for

habit (neurons that fire together, wire together), but this

explanation is inefficient in that it attempts to find habit (and,

in fact, memory) within the (material) synaptic connections between

neurons. The habit itself, however, is not this material; it only

affects arrangement of material. This arrangement, however,

depends on the existence of the material to embody it, and

therefore the habit (which is intentional) depends upon the

material. As James explains, “Organic matter, especially nervous

tissue, seems endowed with a very extraordinary degree of

plasticity of this sort; so that we may without hesitation lay

down as our first proposition the following, that the phenomena of

habit in living beings are due to the plasticity of the organic materials of which their

bodies are composed.”198

At this point I suggest we recall my earlier discussion of

Aristotle’s notion of matter. I discussed at that point several

authors whose work tended towards the conclusion that “material”

in Aristotle is not the has-mass-and-takes-up-space kind of matter

we are used to. Rather, it is itself potentiality; but it was not

only prime matter (that is, it is not called potentiality because

we could find no other coherent description), but rather

“material” seems to convey the potentiality of being arranged into

a formal structure, and in order to become habitually associated,

organic materials must display plasticity of the sort James

describes above. When we want to apply this directly to the

nervous system, we will want to say that the arrangement of synapses198 Ibid., 68.

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is an instance of an intentional form, embodied in nervous tissue.

While this is a tempting conclusion, we will see that, in fact,

such an application of intentional form is seemingly inadequate,

as the arrangement is not only indeterminate, but the activation

of the synapses is probabilistic. Where James described a linear

set of events, propelled by sensations causing muscle

contractions, we cannot find a similar linearity embodied.

A habit is formed by repeated action, and such repeated

action must effect something in order for it to be made more

permanent; that is, there must be a difference between an action

and a habit. Both James and Sheldrake liken this to the creating

of a path, but in James’ conception, the path is formed in the

material itself:

A path once traversed by a nerve-current might be

expected to follow the law of most of the paths we know,

and to be scooped out and made more permanent than

before; and this ought to be repeated with each new

passage of the current. Whatever obstructions may have

kept it at first from being a path should then, little

by little, and more and more, be swept out of the way,

until at least it might become a natural drainage-

channel. This is what happens where either solids or

liquids pass over a path; there seems no reason why it

should not happen where the thing that passes is a mere

wave of rearrangement in matter that does not displace

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itself, but merely changes chemically or turns itself

round in place, or vibrates across the line.199

We will see in Sheldrake’s (more current) research, however, that

there is no linear relationship between how many times an action

has been performed and its becoming a habit, just as there is no

linear relationship between the acting out of a habit and the

formation of a particular synaptic arrangement.

Sheldrake uses a field concept to denote habit. He argues for

the existence of morphic fields, under which are subsumed types of

fields, including the morphogenetic, to the efficacy of which he

attributes the formation of matter into characteristic organic

forms (for example, “squirrel”); mental fields, which are in part

responsible for perception; and motor fields, which are

responsible for the type of behaviour which I’m describing as

habitual (that is, the habitual action of a biological entity). I

therefore consider it justified to describe his motor fields as a

type of habit existing intentionally, and it is this particular

type of field that I will be using to illustrate the material

dependence (and independence) of an intentional habit. While all

of them might rightly be said to qualify under the term “habit” as

I conceive of it, the examples I have dealt with are of motor

actions specifically.

We must recall the original intent of the field concept to

describe something that must be there in order for the observed

phenomenon to take place (since action at a distance must be

mediated by something), which I described in the introduction.

199 James, 70.118


Einstein refers to the field conception as “incidental” and

“indeed somewhat arbitrary”,200 and indeed it is. And while

electromagnetic or gravitational fields may seem less arbitrary

than morphic fields (morphic fields are what Sheldrake deems to be

an overarching concept that encompasses all of the other fields he

describes, morphogenetic or mental for example, and they are

explicitly said to be neither material nor energetic),

nevertheless they intend to describe a physical phenomenon (that

is, a natural phenomenon). A habit exhibiting intentional being is

obviously within the realm of nature.

Sheldrake points out how a materialistic interpretation of

habit is inadequate and uses his theory of morphic fields to

attempt to fill an explanatory gap: “the habits depend on motor

fields which are not stored within the brain at all, but are given

directly from its past states by morphic resonance.”201 That is,

under this description, a habit depends on a motor field, which

governs a motor action. This field is developed by past states,

that is, past actions of the same subject. Sheldrake uses the200 Einstein, Relativity, 63.

201 Sheldrake, New Science of Life, 175. We must define “resonance” generally here, as the effect on a system of an external agency. As A.P. French states, “If we are to extend our ideas in this way, we need to be able tosay in rather general terms what we mean by resonance, and we can begin by asking ourselves: What is the real essence of the behaviour of the mass and spring system? And putting aside the mathematics we can say this: The system is acted on by an external agency, one parameter of which (the frequency) is varied. The response of the system, as measured by its amplitude and phase, or by the power absorbed, undergoes rapid changes as the frequency passes through a certain value… When we carry over these ideas to the resonance behaviour of other physical systems, weshall find that the quantities that characterize a resonance are not always frequency, absorbed power, and amplitude.” French, A.P. Vibrations and Waves, W.W. Norton, 1971, 77.

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concept of resonance to describe how a past action determines a

present one, in that when a subject engages in an action similar

to one previously acted, the current action is affected by the

past action due to the motor field’s having been altered by the

previous action (or repeated action), and forms the present action

due to the similar base structure (or situation). That is, as a

physical system reacts to its resonant frequency (and as identical

systems have identical resonant frequencies), the subject reacts

to a resonant habit; that is, its past self is identical to the

current self, and the similar structures of both body and motor

field allow the particular action to resonate from the past action

to the present. I say all this by way of introduction, for the

aspects of Sheldrake’s analysis I am interested in are not the

technical intricacies of his theory but his motivations for

creating it. It is in terms of resonance that Sheldrake explains

the learning of typical behaviours (of a species, of a social

species, etc.):

None of these patterns of behaviour expresses itself

spontaneously: all have to be learned. An individual is

initiated into particular patterns of behaviour by other

members of the society. Then as the process of learning

begins, usually by imitation, the performance of a

characteristic pattern of movement brings the individual

into morphic resonance with all those who have carried

out this pattern of movement in the past. Consequently

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learning is facilitated as the individual ‘tunes in’ to

specific chreodes.202

These chreodes that Sheldrake mentions are described as paths

within a field that become likely behavioural patterns based on

past actions. They can be likened to James’ drainage channels,

except that James describes them as affecting the material

structure of the organism, whereas Sheldrake conceives of them as

affecting an immaterial field. The reasons for Sheldrake’s

immaterial conception are based on conclusions he takes from the

biochemical structure of the organic subject, and it is these I

believe to be applicable to ascertaining the relation of habit to

the material structure of a subject. What we take from Sheldrake,

then, has less to do with his theory than with the inconsistencies

he notes in the materialistic explanations for behaviour.

Specifically, he wants something to account for the

indeterminacies of the material system. In the following

quotation, he describes such indeterminacies with respect to the

brain:

Within the brain, a typical nerve cell has thousands of

fine thread-like projections that end in synaptic

junctions on other nerve cells; and, conversely,

projections from hundreds or thousands of other nerve

cells end in synapses on its own surface. Some of these

nerve endings release excitatory transmitters that tend

to promote the firing of an impulse; others are

inhibitory and reduce the tendency of the nerve to fire.202 Sheldrake, New Science of Life, 199.

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The triggering of impulses in fact depends on a balance

of excitatory and inhibitory influences from hundreds of

synapses. It seems likely that, at any given time, in

many of the nerve cells in the brain this balance is

poised so critically that firing either occurs or does

not occur as a result of probabilistic fluctuations

within the cell membranes or synapses. Thus the

deterministic propagation of nerve impulses from place

to place within the body is combined with a high degree

of indeterminism within the central nervous system,

which, on the present hypothesis, is ordered and

patterned by formative causation.203

We can see from this passage that there is something that is

required in order to make sense of behavioural patterns. That is,

the pattern, or the order which is observed as associated with

habitual behaviour is not sufficiently explained by the material

nervous system, which includes inherent indeterminism. Sheldrake

does not intend, however, to neglect the material system as

ineffective. It is a necessary condition, but insufficient: “This

is not to say that reflexes and instincts do not depend on a very

specifically patterned morphogenesis of the nervous system.

Obviously they do. Nor is it to say that during processes of

learning no physical or chemical changes occur in the nervous

system which facilitate the repetition of a pattern of movement.”204

203 Sheldrake, New Science of Life, 164.

204 Sheldrake, New Science of Life, 174.122


Rather, the physical or chemical changes do not account for the

repetition of a pattern of movement.

A second problem with the materialist account of habitual

action that Sheldrake points to is that there is no linear

relationship between the repetition of an action and the formation

of a habit; that is, there is no way to quantify the relationship.

I cannot assume that if I complete an action ten times it will

become habitual, nor can I say that if I perform the action four

times I will have 40% of a habit. Sheldrake discusses this

phenomenon in the context of associative learning. We may rightly

say that an association is a habit, in that it is habitual

association; as with habits, associations can be made and broken,

and they depend on things outside of themselves for their being.

Sheldrake describes the orthodox interpretation in this short

passage: “When the new stimulus and the original stimulus occur

simultaneously, it might at first sight seem likely that the

different patterns of physico-chemical change they bring about in

the brain gradually become linked with each other as a result of

frequent repetition.”205 So, with the example of Pavlov’s dogs, it

would seem that the constant association of the bell with food

causes an association in the connections of the brain such that

bell and food ideas become associated, and this is demonstrated by

the fact that the dogs salivate at the sound of the bell; that is,

the sensation of the bell activates within the brain the reactions

normally associated with food (salivation). But this is not a

gradual association. After two or three conditioning repetitions

(the first few times Pavlov attempts to forge an association), it205 Ibid., 182.

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is not the case that the dogs come to salivate “a little bit” (to

a lesser extent than after their conditioning is complete), and it

is not the case that the dogs gradually come to salivate more and

more as their conditioning is reinforced. There is either an

association or there is not. This may be probabilistic (the dogs

may salivate at the tone of a bell 80% of the time), but it is not

the case that they will have an 80% association, and these two

interpretations certainly cannot be equated. A probabilistic

association would have to be a habit working in conjunctionby

formative causation, on Sheldrake’s accountwith the probabilistic

firing of neurons that he spoke of above; whereas the latter is

almost nonsensicaleither the “salivation” neurons fire or they do

not. Sheldrake ascribes this step-wise learning of an association

to the presence of a new motor field instantiated by the previous

actions, whereas I would say it is the formation of a habit.

“Associative learning seems to involve definite discontinuities:

it occurs in steps, or stages. This may be because the linkage

between the new and the original stimulus involves the

establishment of a new motor field: the field responsible for the

original response must somehow be enlarged to incorporate the new

stimulus.”206 A discontinuous function would seem to indicate a new

cause that has come into effect (as a general rule) or the coming

into being of a habit (in this case).

It may be asked why we should not interpret the phenomenon of

association this way: the repetition forms a gradual association

that does not create a noticeable effect until it overcomes some

limit, and that limit may very well be material. There could be a206 Ibid.

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minimum number of synapses that need to be formed before one

neuron predictably causes the firing of another. But this is the

wrong type of answer to the wrong type of question. The habit is

not in either the neurons or the synapses, nor is it their pattern

or arrangement. The habit affects their arrangement, but is itself

simply not to be found in the material at all. The material in

this case arranges in such a way that it facilitates the enactment

of a habitual action (as we have seen Sheldrake state above), but

the material is not the cause of the habit. A habit, as an

intentional form, does not inhabit material; that is, it is not

responsible for making a material thing what it is. Rather, it

informs behaviour, another immaterial notion. They can be thought of

analogously: “We might say that habits are to actions as forms are

to matter (and that just as form + matter = object, so do habit +

action = behaviour).”207 We may say that a habit is dependent upon

the material, and also that it causes alteration within the

material itself to facilitate further action, but we cannot say

that a habit informs matter in the same sense that the form of

“table” informs wood. A man is not his behaviour (in an

ontological sense).

While Sheldrake asserts that the effect of repeated action

results in the creation of a motor field, we must deviate at this

point. As I have said above, the notion of a field is arbitrary,

but in physical phenomena it is always intended to signify an area

of effect around an object of a particular sort that is generating

the field. A motor field in Sheldrake’s sense, however, effects

the same thing which is to have created it, and extends over time207 Mitscherling, Jeff, Aesthetic Genesis, Manuscript dated April 19, 2008, 196.

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as well as space (through resonance). This confusing concept can

be replaced if we are willing to let go of some prejudices, which

are in actuality the same as we have to abandon in order to admit

intentional being at all. As Mitscherling says:

They [habits] enjoy intentional being, not material

being, so they don’t ‘exist’ in the same manner as

spatio-temporal entities like couches, and they can’t be

said to ‘be’ at any physical location at all. To ask

‘where’ a habit is located is something like asking how

much the idea of nature weighs; this isn’t merely a

‘category mistake’it is an error of substance, or

‘being’. Habits subsist, just as do laws of nature and just

as do relations among the parts of an organic unity, and

while such subsisting ‘entities’ may persist or endure

through time, they cannot be ‘located’ at any one spatial

point or in any one temporal moment.208

The problem of association leads us into our next discussion,

which concerns the subject’s association of material elements in

the environment.

The Dependence of Habit on the Material Structure of the

WorldUp to this point I have been speaking of particular associations

and particular actions, as this is how the examples have appeared

in the texts. Merleau-Ponty, however, wants to note that such an

208 Mitscherling, Aes. Gen, 197.126


association is not what actually exists. When a subject becomes

habituated to a world, it is not that they become familiar with

particular objects; rather it is a particular way of dealing with

objects.

The acquisition of habit as a rearrangement and renewal

of the corporeal schema presents great difficulties to

traditional philosophies, which are always inclined to

conceive synthesis as intellectual synthesis. It is

quite true that what brings together, in habit,

component actions, reactions and ‘stimuli’ is not some

external process of association. Any mechanistic theory

runs up against the fact that the learning process is

systematic; the subject does not weld together

individual movements and individual stimuli but acquires

the power to respond with a certain type of solution to

situations of a general form.209

We must note first of all Merleau-Ponty’s terminology here:

whereas James thought of a habit as a rearrangement of matter, and

Sheldrake thought of it as the creation of a motor field, Merleau-

Ponty conceives of a habit (a motor habit, in particular) to be

the rearrangement of a corporeal schema. Merleau-Ponty

distinguishes the phenomenal body from the objective body (that

is, the material body that can be experienced objectively by

others); the phenomenal body is that which is experienced

subjectively, and if a subject becomes habituated to an object

outside itself (a keyboard, a stick, a hat, etc.), then their209 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception,164.

127


phenomenal body is altered to accord with their interaction with

such an object. This notion of a habit does not only apply to the

subject’s encounter with physical objects. Again, the notion of

habit can be applied equally as well to cognition, as it is by

Mitscherling: ‘“this is the kind of being that habits enjoy and

that behaviour exhibits, in cognition no less than in bodily

action.”210 For Merleau-Ponty, this is also the case: “When a child

grows accustomed to distinguishing blue from red, it is observed,

that the habit cultivated in relation to these two colours helps

with the rest.”211 He goes on to say,

To learn to see colours… is to acquire a certain style

of seeing, a new use of one’s own body: it is to enrich

and recast the body image. Whether a system of motor or

perceptual powers, our body is not an object for an ‘I

think’, it is a grouping of lived-through meanings which

moves towards its equilibrium.212

This is the first indication we have seen (in this section), that

what we are becoming habituated to when a habit is formed is not

necessarily just some object in the world or a mode of action.

Rather, the particular object in the world to which we become

accustomed has its own associations in such a way that, becoming

habituated to one object or one thought, one becomes habituated to

a particular kind of object or a particular mode of thinking. That210 Mitscherling, Aes. Gen., 193.

211 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 177. Merleau-Ponty’s footnote: Koffka, Growth of the Mind, 174 and ff.

212 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 177.128


such an association can exist independently of the subject (like a

relation that subsists between entities, as with the double and

the half, and those suggested by Plotinus) is one of the

metaphysical implications I suggested in the introduction to this

section, and while I do not believe it is outside the scope of the

applications of intentional being, I cannot possibly provide a

thorough analysis of it here. Instead, I will attempt to

concentrate on how a subject becomes habituated to a particular

object (but the reader should note this implied extension).

Recalling what I wrote earlier, in the introduction to this

chapter, the body for Merleau-Ponty is comparable, in its being,

to a work of art. The being of the work of art has been discussed,

and it seems that it can be nothing other than intentional. The

body for Merleau-Ponty, as I have stated, is the phenomenal body

(referred to simply as “the body” in the following, if otherwise

unspecified). The body is not simply the material aspect of the

human subject, and it is not confined to the material which

composes a human. The body, rather, is a “habit body”; as Merleau-

Ponty explains, “the patient is conscious of his bodily space as

the matrix of his habitual action.”213 That is, the body is

alterable by habituation to objects existing outside, which the

subject experiences as potentialities for action. The body, too,

is a potentiality for interacting with the world; the interaction

itself is ontologically primary, and this interaction is or

becomes habitual. Through interaction with red and blue the

subject learns to distinguish between them and other colours, but

it also develops a habit of cognizing with respect to colour. 213 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 119.

129


If we interpret the body materially, then we can make no

sense of Merleau-Ponty’s theory, for instance when he says, “If

habit is neither a form of knowledge nor an involuntary action,

what then is it? It is knowledge in the hands, which is

forthcoming only when bodily effort is made, and cannot be

formulated in detachment from that effort.”214 We cannot interpret

this to mean that there is, in the material hand, some kind of

knowledge (presumably also material) that dictates the hand’s

capabilities. Rather, we might say that the material hand works

under a habit which is activated when the hand is put into action.

That is, the habit informs the behaviour of the hand whenever it

engages in such behaviour. I have quoted from Mitscherling earlier

as to how habits inform behaviour analogously to how forms inform

matter; we might see the applicability of this through a specific

application, given in his work with regard to the action of

stealing from a jewellery store: “That is, just as the ‘form’ of

‘desk’ is said to be the formal cause of the physical deskit

informs the matter of this piece of furnitureso does the form of

‘stealing a necklace from a jewellery store’ inform the action of

the thief.”215 While the point of this example is to differentiate

the action of the jewellery thief from that of the accidental

theft by a young girl, it also applies when we consider Merleau-

Ponty’s hand. The phenomenal body is the habitual matrix, whereas

the material body is hardly even a consideration; the material

hand may engage in uninformed action, but the phenomenal body acts

214 Ibid., 166.

215 Mitscherling, Aes. Gen., 195.130


intentionally (informed by a habit). While both may engage in the

acts of reaching forward and grasping a necklace, the action of

“stealing” is something the phenomenal body does, not the

material. Since the action of the young girl was not a result of

the habitual matrix of her phenomenal body, she could not possibly

be “stealing”.

In fact, the relation between the thief and the necklace is

the result of habitual interaction. This habitual interaction is,

however, directly dependent on the material object and the

material body. To state the most obvious conclusion, the body must

be such that it is capable of grasping (perhaps covertly) objects

within its reach, and the necklace must be something that is

graspable (that is, a material object). These material

dependencies govern the interaction at a most fundamental level,

but they do not account for that interaction between the subject

and the necklace which we call “stealing”.

We encounter in Merleau-Ponty a line of thought similar to

William James regarding the unconscious nature of a habit. The

problem stems, Merleau-Ponty believes, from attempting to

interpret the body and the material world objectively, and as

interacting only through sense data. He uses the example of a

habit to explain how this explanation is insufficient. James

states that the conscious attention we pay to actions decreases as

they become habitual, and Merleau-Ponty writes, along similar

lines:

One is tempted to say that through the sensations

produced by the pressure of the stick on the hand, the

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blind man builds up the stick along with its various

positions, and that the latter then mediate a second

order object, the external thing. It would appear in

this case that perception is always a reading off from

the same sensory data, but constantly accelerated, and

operating with ever more attenuated signals. But habit

does not consist in interpreting the pressures of the

stick on the hand as indications of certain positions of

the stick, and these as signs of an external object,

since it relieves us of the necessity of doing so.216

Thus habit, while intentional in being, operates unconsciously (as

consciousness is commonly defined, with respect to awareness or

attention). When we say that consciousness is always consciousness

of, we mean to say that consciousness is directed. How it is

directed, however, is largely a result of habit.

When something becomes incorporated into a habitual body

schema, it is no longer an object at which consciousness is

directed. Rather, it becomes part of the body schema and can, in

fact, be directed outward. The blind man’s stick, which has become

a habitual part of his phenomenal body, is how he becomes

conscious of other, unfamiliar objects. The same is true of any

tool subjected to frequent use, for example, a keyboard: “When the

typist performs the necessary movement on the typewriter, these

movements are governed by an intention, but the intention does not

posit the keys as objective locations. It is literally true that

the subject who learns to type incorporates the key-bank space

216 Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 176.132


into his bodily space.”217 Again, while we may not say that the

keyboard becomes part of the material body, we can emphasize the

importance of the material, as the intention of the typist

requires a specific material formation to be completed (that is,

to be typed upon).

I have said specifically that a habit depends on the material

of both the subject and the objective world, and I hope that this

has demonstrated a more general dependence of intentional being on

material being. As well, I have emphasized that this dependence

cannot be thought of as evidence that intentional being is

conceptually replaceable by an expanded explanation of material

being, nor that it is in any way an epiphenomenon of the material

world or subject. In addition, choosing habit as an example should

have brought to light the active nature of being which I argued

for in my treatment of Aristotle as well as in my discussion of

current realist phenomenology, as habit (as an instance of

something being intentionally) engages in the activity of

informing specific activities. I have mentioned how habit governs

a disparate bunch of activities, including cognition, learning,

and interacting with various objects in the world. In these

examples, there are various objects which I have defined

implicitly (or explicitly) as exhibiting intentional beinghabits

(of course), the work of art, the body, objects in the world. But

the intentional being of some of these things cannot be defined

discretely. The intentional being of the body and an object of

use, for instance, exhibits inherent relations to something217 Merleau-Ponty, PhP, 167.

133


outside of itself. Intentional being is relational, that is,

indicative of relations physically existing (existing in nature)

prior to the insertion of conscious subjects.

I conclude this study by way of a brief summary. In Chapter 1

I reviewed some major problems for various fields of science whose

dogmatic fidelity to materialism is unfounded. Next I attempted to

clarify “being” before specifically concentrating on intentional

being. We saw in Chapter 2 how, if we are to take our concept of

being from Aristotle, it must be an activitythe activity is

something’s being. I attempted to show what I mean by “material”

when I say that intentional being has a material dependence by

introducing the concept of being as potentiality, and I

concentrated on Aristotle’s category of relation in order to bring

focus to the phenomenological debate on whether the intentional

object is real. Next we saw how the early commentators diverged

from Aristotle’s concepts, reconciling them with Plato’s despite

the fact that Aristotle argues explicitly against Plato’s doctrine

of Forms. This contradiction, however, appears in the Metaphysics

and only became available to the Medieval writers, who again

debated regarding the reality of intention and introduced the

doctrine of second intentions. Brentano gets his concept of

intention directly from these Medieval authors, and though he

maintains that the categories themselves are real, the intentional

object, that to which consciousness is related, he states (as

Boethius before him) to be real only in the sense of being true,

but altogether a product of consciousness. Husserl also believes

the world comes about as a result of the activity of the134


transcendental subject. Only in Ingarden do we see a real return

to realism. In current realist phenomenology, we see not only a

realism with regard to the intentional object, but the description

of a type of being necessary if we are to describe Aristotle’s

forms as real at all. Capable of coming into being and being

destroyed, but immaterial, these forms are intentional.

Intentionality pervades nature just as it does thought, and blurs

the boundary between subject and object. We see a similar blurring

with Merleau-Ponty’s elimination of the subject-object

distinction, as intentional relations are formed between the

subject and various objects to which it becomes habituated.

Finally, we see how intentional being is dependent upon material

being. Aristotle’s forms cannot exist outside of matter except as

logical entities, and the same is true with the current conception

of intentional forms. Intentional being is implicated with

material being in such a way that habit depends on what is

available as material, and that the material must be such that it

is conducive to the formation of habit.

135

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On the Concept of Intentional Being

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