Intentionality occupies a pivotal position across the depth-psychology corpus, traversing phenomenological philosophy, embodied cognition, action theory, myth studies, and affective neuroscience. The term carries at least three distinguishable senses that authors deploy, often without full disambiguation: the phenomenological sense derived from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, wherein consciousness is always already directed toward or open to a world; the agentive-philosophical sense of acting with or having an intention, scrutinized by analytic action theorists such as Davidson and Anscombe; and the social-ontological sense in which shared intentionality constitutes collective reality, most explicitly developed by Barrett in the context of emotion categories. Thompson’s sustained engagement with Husserl shows how intentionality bifurcates into the static correlational structure of noesis and noema and a deeper genetic or operative intentionality — Merleau-Ponty’s fungierende Intentionalität — which precedes any explicit subject-object posture and is rooted in bodily, affective, and habitual life. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of action presses on the temporal dimension that analytic accounts persistently suppress, while mythological writers such as Campbell deploy a looser ‘mythical intentionality’ as a narrative-cognitive category. The central tension is between intentionality as an explicit, first-person epistemic act and intentionality as an anonymous, prereflective motor of experience — a tension that frames the enactive, phenomenological, and depth-psychological reconceptions of mind as embodied and world-constituting.
beneath intentionality related to acts, or thetic intentionality, another kind which is the condition of the former’s possibility: namely an operative intentionality already at work before any positing or any judgement
Merleau-Ponty argues that a pre-thematic, operative intentionality — a bodily logos at work before any explicit act — grounds and makes possible the thetic intentionality of conscious representation.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962thesis
‘Operative intentionality fungierende Intentionalität designates prereflective experience that is functional without having to be thematic or engaged in an explicit epistemic acquisition. It constitutes the prepredicative unity of objects, of the world, and of our life.’
Thompson elaborates Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s concept of operative intentionality as a pre-reflective, anonymous function that underlies all thematic experience, including drive-intentionality, erotic intentionality, and habitual bodily comportment.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
the relevant notion of intentionality is not so much object-directedness as openness to the world, here in the bodily form of an implicit sensibility or sentience that does not have any clear subject-object structure. Intentionality at this level functions anonymously, involuntarily, spontaneously, and receptively.
Thompson distinguishes a pre-objective, anonymous level of intentionality grounded in bodily sentience and passive synthesis, contrasting it with the narrower philosophical notion of object-directedness.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
The correlational structure of intentionality belongs to what Husserl called static phenomenology… from the standpoint of genetic phenomenology, we need to account for the correlational structure of intentionality developmentally by understanding how it emerges from inarticulate experience
Thompson traces the transition from Husserl’s static phenomenology of intentional correlation to genetic phenomenology, which explains how the noetic-noematic structure itself arises from pre-intentional bodily and temporal experience.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
such experiences do qualify as intentional in the broader phenomenological sense of being open to what is other or having a world-involving character. Thus bodily feelings are not self-enclosed without openness to the world.
Thompson argues that moods and bodily feelings possess a non-object-directed yet genuinely intentional character insofar as they disclose the world affectively, expanding the phenomenological concept beyond narrow act-intentionality.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007thesis
we have no grip on what reality means apart from what is disclosed to us as real, and such disclosure necessarily involves the intentional activity of consciousness.
Thompson grounds the transcendental phenomenological reduction in the claim that reality is always already an achievement of intentional constitution, making intentionality the inescapable condition of any disclosure of the real.
, Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind, 2007supporting
If a being is consciousness, he must be nothing but a network of intentions… Husserl’s originality lies beyond the notion of intentionality; it is to be found in the elaboration of this notion and in the discovery, beneath the intentionality of representations, of a deeper intentionality, which others have called existence.
Merleau-Ponty identifies Husserl’s genuine contribution not as the bare concept of intentionality but as the discovery of a deeper existential intentionality beneath representational acts, fusing consciousness with being-in-the-world.
, Phenomenology of Perception, 1962thesis
Emotion categories, in my view, are made real through collective intentionality. To communicate to someone else that you feel angry, both of you need a shared understanding of ‘Anger.’
Barrett deploys collective intentionality as the social-constitutive mechanism through which emotion categories acquire reality, arguing that shared conceptual agreement — not biological essence — is what makes emotions like anger ‘real.’
, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017thesis
the ways the body plays an active part in shaping perception and action, its functional roles in enabling intentionality, and the constraints and possibilities defined by the shape and structure of the human body.
Gallagher treats intentionality as enabled and constrained by pre-noetic bodily structures, arguing that the body’s morphology and neurobiological organization are constitutive conditions of intentional engagement with the world.
, How the Body Shapes the Mind, 2005supporting
The formation of an intention is just this unconditional judgment… ‘Pure intendings constitute a subclass of the all-out judgements, those directed to future actions of the agent, and made in light’
Ricoeur, via Davidson, frames the formation of intention as an unconditional or ‘all-out’ practical judgment directed toward future action, while pressing Davidson on the temporal and agentive dimensions his analysis suppresses.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
following common linguistic usage, we distinguish between three uses of the term ‘intention’: having done or doing something intentionally, acting with a certain intention, intending to …
Ricoeur maps three grammatically distinct uses of ‘intention’ in analytic action theory — adverbial, purposive, and prospective — to clarify what is at stake in phenomenological and philosophical analyses of intentional action.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
the temporal dimension should not be taken into account in the analysis of intention and whether the intention-with-which… is not in this respect a weak, even mutilated, form of intention-to, for which the delay between intention and action is essential.
Ricoeur argues that analytic action theory’s privileging of the retrospective ‘intention-with-which’ distorts the phenomenon by suppressing the temporal stretch — the forward-oriented delay — that constitutes genuine intending.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
the attestation of the intentional aim is not the work of some ‘very queer and special sort of seeing eye in the middle of the acting’… attestation escapes sight, if sight is expressed in propositions held to be true or false.
Ricoeur, critiquing Anscombe, argues that the first-person attestation of an intentional aim is not epistemic observation but a mode of testimony that exceeds the truth-functional categories of conceptual analysis.
, Oneself as Another, 1992supporting
Mythical intentionality is an important example of the narrative mode of thought, which is identified by psychologist Jerome Bruner as one of the two primary modes of human cognition. The narrative mode ‘deals in human or human-like intention and action and the vicissitudes and consequences that mark their course’
In myth studies, intentionality is extended into a narrative-cognitive register: ‘mythical intentionality’ names the mode in which stories project purposive, agentive meaning onto events, constituting myth as distinct from mere story.
, The Power of Myth, 1988supporting
Mythical intentionality is an important example of the narrative mode of thought… Religious intentionality may thus take on quite different forms. Sometimes it is used to interpret events as dependent upon spiritual forces.
Noel extends Campbell’s framework by distinguishing mythical from religious intentionality, showing how intentional projection onto events — reading spiritual agency into phenomena — constitutes a specifically religious mode of world-disclosure.
, Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion, 1990supporting
stories like the Garden of Eden as myths because they have proven to have the power to evoke mythical intentionality among a critical mass of people. Myths can lose that power and become only stories.
Campbell treats mythical intentionality as a capacity that narratives can evoke or lose, linking it to the affective-existential power of myth to engage a community’s deepest orientations rather than merely entertain.
, The Power of Myth, 1988supporting
the power to evoke mythical intentionality among a critical mass of people. Myths can lose that power and become only stories.
Noel reiterates the distinction between myth as a living evocation of intentional engagement and mythology as inert narrative, framing mythical intentionality as a communal-affective achievement rather than a textual property.
, Paths to the Power of Myth: Joseph Campbell and the Study of Religion, 1990supporting
The problem of intentionality never ceased to be discussed, from that time onwards, in criminal law, civil law, and legal theory… intention was assessed, in its legal relevance, according to the amount of knowledge the delinquent had
Dihle traces the ancient Greek emergence of intentionality as a legal-ethical concept, showing how the distinction between intentional and inadvertent action was encoded in terms of knowledge rather than will, setting the stage for later philosophical development.
, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982supporting
In discussing problems of intentionality Aristotle easily shifts from criminal law to general standards of moral behavior
Dihle notes that Aristotle’s treatment of intentionality moves fluidly between legal and ethical registers, reflecting the foundational entanglement of intentional action with responsibility and moral evaluation in classical thought.
, The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity, 1982supporting
intentionality and conscious planning are closely
Panksepp briefly associates intentionality with conscious planning in the context of cortical function, suggesting a neuroscientific correlate for higher-order intentional processes.
, Affective Neuroscience The Foundations of Human and Animal, 1998aside
where it really matters, intention may drop out entirely… Most of the more important moral scenes in our experience turn on questions about the subject’s inner state.
This passage raises the paradox — most vivid in literary examples like Billy Budd and Oedipus — that moral significance can persist or be undermined independently of the agent’s explicit intention, complicating intentionalist ethics.
, Encounters with the Soul: Active Imagination as Developed by C. G. Jung, 1981aside
The second reason is the concern to provide an intelligible transition between intentional action (in the sense of an action done intentionally) and action done with the intention
Ricoeur identifies the need to bridge the descriptive and evaluative dimensions of intentional action as a central motivation in analytic action theory, pointing toward practical reasoning as the locus of this transition.
, Oneself as Another, 1992aside
emotion concepts have social reality. They exist in your human mind that is conjured in your human brain, which is part of nature.
Barrett establishes the theoretical background for collective intentionality by arguing that emotion categories, while socially constituted, are grounded in biological processes of categorization — a position preparatory to her explicit invocation of collective intentionality.
, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, 2017aside