of the real world by their own transforming power into the sanctuary of
our inner life.^29
On to this sorry scene enters Edmund Husserl. “You see that tree?
Well it’s really there, just where you see it, next to the road, in the dust,
alone and twisted under the scorching heat, twenty yards from the
Mediterranean coast,” rather than a construction of our senses or a
projection of our minds, as the academic philosophers would have it.
Away with empirio-criticism, with neo-Kantianism, with psychologism:
that tree could never enter “into” our consciousness, for it is irreducibly
other than our consciousness. Rather than a juxtaposition of the incon-
gruous, we are dealing with the “genius” of the concept of intentionality.
But Husserl is not a naive realist. In fact, such realism is precisely what
he designates as the “natural attitude” from which he will liberate us by the
phenomenological “reduction,” as we shall see in Sartre’s next essay.
“Consciousness and world are given at the same time: by its nature exterior
to consciousness, the world is essentially relative to consciousness. Because
Husserl sees consciousness as an irreducible fact that no physical image can
capture, except perhaps,” Sartre ventures, “the quick and obscure image of
an explosion.” Yes, that’s it: “To know is to ‘burst out towards’...” This is
Sartre’s dramatic rendition of Husserl’s famous phrase, “All consciousness
is consciousnessofan other.” Husserl calls this feature “intentionality.” It
has since been taken by many as the defining characteristic of the mental.^30
(^29) All of the citations from are fromTE 87 – 89. “Une Idee ́fondementale de la phe ́nome ́nologie
de Husserl: L’Intentionalite ́”; English: “A Fundamental Idea of Husserl’s Phenomenology:
Intentionality.”
(^30) Intentionality has a long history dating at least to medieval Schoolmen and revived by
Husserl’s teacher in Vienna, Franz Brentano, a former Dominican friar, who was schooled
in the doctrine of “esse intentionale” as the mode of being proper to mental objects (“psychic
phenomena”sic; Gurvitch,Tendences actuelle, 28 ,n. 1 ), such as numbers, essences, relations
and imaginary objects were traditionally called. (See Franz Brentano,Psychology from an
Empirical Standpoint[ 1867 ], ed. Oaker Kraus, trans. Antos C. Rancurello et al. [London:
Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973 ]). According to Georges Gurvitch, when you add the influ-
ence of Husserl’s other professor in Vienna, the distinguished mathematician and philoso-
pher Bernard Bolzano (who supported the validity of truth (“a proposition in itself”)
absolutely outside of thought, not only effective thought, as Leibniz held, but all possible
thought as well, you discover the two leading influences on Husserl’s early thought. As
Gurvitch summarizes the matter: Husserl’s initial effort was “to achieve a synthesis of
Bolzano’s conceptions of placing logic completely outside of psychology and those of
Brentano, opening new routes in psychology itself that show the way to overcome it”
(Gurvitch,Tendences actuelle, 28 ,n. 1 ).
The first fruit of Sartre’s Berlin efforts 63