Phenomenology shows that the mind is a public thing, that it acts and manifests itself out in the open, not just inside its own confines. Everything is outside. The mind and the world are correlated with each other.
Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, 2000 – P 12
For phenomenology, intentionality is highly differentiated. There are different kinds of intending, correlated with different kinds of objects. …intentionalities can be distinguished, such as the kinds that occur when we think about the past. What sort of intending is exercised when, say, archeologists find pots and ashes and scraps of clothing and begin to speak about people who lived in a given site seven hundred years ago? How do these objects, these pots and ashes, present human beings to us? How do we “take” them, so that they will serve in that way? Sorting out and differentiating all these intentionalities, as well as the specific objects correlated with them, is what is done by the kind of philosophy called phenomenology.
Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, 2000 – P 13
A painting is not executed by anything analogous to an orchestra performance; it is presented directly when it is viewed, not when someone performs it. No viewer must become between the viewers and the work as the musicians must come between the listeners and the work. However, one and the same painting can be seen at one moment and remembered at another, written analyses of the painting can be given, copies of it can be painted, and prints, “reproductions”, of the painting can be made. There is also a difference how the painting appeared to the artist and how it appears to the viewer, as well as differences between the viewing of a cultivated viewer and a mere curiosity seeker. The painting waits for its viewers in order to be completed as a work of art, but it does so in a way different from how a symphony waits for performances in order to come into actual being. The identities and the manifolds are different in each case.
Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, 2000 – P 30
….people will often take the mind to be a self-enclosed sphere, that is, a piece that can be separated from the worldly context to which it naturally and essentially belongs. Then they will ask how the mind can ever get outside itself and find out what is going on in the world. But the mind cannot be separated out this way; the mind is a moment to the world and the things in it; the mind is essentially correlated with objects. The mind is essentially intentional. There is no problem about how we get to “external” reality, because the mind should never be separated from reality from the beginning. Mind and being are moments to each other; they are not pieces that can be segmented out of the whole to which they belong. Likewise, the human mind is often separated from the brain and the body as though it were a piece and not a moment founded upon them….
Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, 2000 – P 25
We tend to think that everything we are aware of must be actually present to us; we seem incapable of thinking we can truly intend what is absent. We shy away from absence even though it is all around us and preoccupies us all the time. Thus, when we want to explain how we can speak about objects that are not present, we tend to say that we are dealing with an image or a concept of the objects, which is present, and through that image or concept we reach toward the absent thing.
Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, 2000 – P 36
When we are looking for something and cannot find it, the absence of the thing is all to present to us. We live constantly in the future and in the past, in the distant and the transcendent, in the unknown and the suspected; we do not live only in the world around us as is given to the five senses.
Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, 2000 – P 37
The world we live in expands beyond our immediate experience and beyond our possible experience: we also perceive a domain in the heavens that we could never reach bodily. We might get to the Moon or some of the planets, but it is impossible for us to reach to the furthest parts of the Universe. We can learn a lot about these places, but much of it will always remain the target of empty intensions rather than fulfillments or perceptions.
Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, 2000 – P 43
…there are many I’s, many egos, many selves, but even among all of them one stands out as the preeminent centre, namely me (that is, you, as you read these words and think them through for yourself). These strange facts about the self or the ego are not just tricks of language; they belong to the kind of being a rational creature is, a creature that can think, that can say “I”, and that can have the world even while being part of the world. The rational soul, as Aristotle says, is somehow all things. The world as a whole and the I as the centre are the two singularities between which all other things can be placed.
Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, 2000 – P 44
Since we live in the paradoxical condition of both having the world and being part of it, we know that when we die the world will still go on, since we are only a part of the world, but in another sense the world that is there for me, behind all the things I know, will be extinguished when I am no longer part of it. Such an extinction is part of the loss we suffer when a close friend dies; it is not just that he is no longer there, but the way the world was for him has also been lost for us. The world has lost a way of being given, one that had been built up over a lifetime.
Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, 2000 – P 46
What does the term “transcendental” mean? The word means “going beyond”, based on its Latin root. Consciousness, even in the natural attitude, is transcendental because it reaches beyond itself to the identities and things that are given to it. The ego can be called transcendental insofar as it is involved, in cognition, a reaching out to things. The transcendental ego is the ego or the self as the agent of truth. The transcendental reduction is the turn toward the ego as the agent of truth, and the transcendental attitude is the stance we take up when we make this ego and its intentionalities thematic.
Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, 2000 – P 58
Phenomenology provides one of the best examples of how a tradition can be reappropriated and brought to life again in a new context.
Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, 2000 – P 63
The most important contribution phenomenology has made to culture and the intellectual life is to have validated the truth of prephilosophical life, experience, and thinking. It insists that the exercises of reason that are carried out in the natural attitude are valid and true. Truth is achieved before philosophy comes onto the scene.
Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, 2000 – P 63
What happens in remembering is that we relive earlier perceptions, and we remember the objects as they were given at the time. We capture that earlier part of our intentional life. We bring it to life again. That is why memories can be so nostalgic. They are not just reminders, they are the activity of reliving. The past comes to life again, along with the things in it, but it comes to life with a special kind of absence, one that we cannot bridge by going anywhere, as we can bridge the absences of the other side of the table by going to another part of the room and looking at it from there.
Someone might object, “This is nonsense. How could I relive a past perception? How could the very same thing, there and then, be given to me again here and now? This is impossible; there must be a picture of it that I look at.” But such reliving of an experience is just what remembering is. It is quite marvelous, but that is how we are wired. We can relive an earlier part of our conscious life, we can reactivate an intentionality. Clearly, there must be some sort of neurological basis for this. The neural activity that is involved in perception is somehow reactivated, the conscious perception is reenacted, and it presents the very same object it had at its original venue. If we are to be faithful to the phenomenon, we have to describe it as it is and not project our wishes onto it. We do stretch into the past through memory; we bring back an elapsed world and a situation in it. We can live in the past as well as in the present. In fact, unless we had the general sense of the past that comes to us through memory, how could we interpret a “mental picture” as an image of something we saw in the past? How could the sense of pastness ever arise for us? The very dimension or horizon of the past is given to us through remembering, as we have described it phenomenologically.
Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, 2000 – P69 – 69
When I remember something past, I also displace myself into the past. A distinction arises between me here and now, sitting in a chair in a room perceiving the walls, windows, and sounds around me, and then, watching an accident occur on the corner of Wisconsin Avenue and Macomb Street yesterday, or me involved in a painful farewell last week. The revival of my earlier perception involves a revival of myself as perceiving at the time. Just as the past object is brought to light again, so my past self as an agent of that experience is brought to light again. Through memory a distinction is introduced between the remembering self and the remembered self.
This displacement of myself into the past introduces a whole new dimension into my mental or inner life. I am not confined to the here and now; I can only refer to the past (and to the future, as we shall see), but I can also live in it through memory.
Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, 2000 – P 70
Terror of death lies in the fact that our imagination turns blank in the face of it.
Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, 2000 – P 74
In phenomenology, to “constitute” a categorial object means to bring it to light, to articulate it, to bring it forth, to actualize its truth. We cannot manifest a thing any way we please; we cannot make an object mean anything we wish. We can bring a thing to light only if the thing offers itself in a certain light. The thing has to show up with certain aspects that we can spotlight if we are able to declare that it has certain features…..If we did not experience something like the abrasions in the car, we would not be able to constitute the car as damaged…..to submit in this way is not to place limitations on our freedom, but to achieve the perfection of our intelligence, which is geared by its nature to disclosing the way things are. To submit in this way is to bring about the triumph of objectivity, which is what our minds are supposed to do. To “constitute” a state of affairs is to exercise our understanding and let a thing manifest itself to us.
Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, 2000 – P93
Categorial intentionality is itself a new kind of identification. When we categorically intend the cube, we have not just the identity of a cube that is perceived through a manifold of sides, aspects, and profiles, and through which manifolds of memory, imagination, and anticipation; we also have the identity achieved through the statements we can make about it, the statements we can hear others make about it from their points of view, and the fulfillments we can achieve when we listen to what others say and then try to confirm their opinions going and looking and directly articulating for ourselves. A whole new range of manifestation and truth is opened up in the categorical domain.
Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, 2000 – P 94
An extremely important point is the fact that when we speak about the present, we are still articulating a part of the world. We are not turning to our ideas or concepts as substitute presences for the things that are absent. We are so constituted that we can intend things in their absence as well as in their presence. The intentionality of consciousness is such that it reaches outward all the time, even when it targets things that are not before it. If I give a speech about the Battle of Antietam, I and my audience intent the battle even though it happened over one hundred and thirty years ago; you and I, here in Washington D.C., talk about the Empire State Building, it is the building we are talking about, not some meanings or images that might come to mind during our conversations.
Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, 2000 – P 97
How could the very dimension of “outside” arise for us if it were not there in the beginning? If consciousness does not start out being intentional, it could never figure out how to become so.
Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, 2000 – P 104
Everyone is vague at some time, and there is nothing regrettable about that. We have to start with vagueness when we enter into a new domain of thinking. Ideas that come to mind are almost always vague at first and ask to be brought to distinctness, when the inconsistencies and incoherence’s in the idea will be filtered out.
Introduction to Phenomenology, Robert Sokolowski, 2000 – P107
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