Intentional Fulfillment

Are We not sealed by the Holy Ghost? Can You choose Not to read? Did Christ pray to be delivered from Crucifixion? Did Esau want to Repent of selling His Birthright? Did God lie in Genesis Do You worship The Work? Does God Love or Hate Sinners? Does It teach that Water Baptism is Salvific? Does Regeneration precede Faith? Does Romans 5 teach that Sin is imputed to all Descendants of Adam? Does Romans 7 describe the Christian Life?

Does the Bible teach Open Theism? Is God ever Surprised? Is Sanctification A Process? Is the Gospel Necessary to Calvinism? Is the Will always determined by the Strongest Motive? Refutation of Norman Geisler on Job Get Used to It!

A Clearer View to Life and Meaning

You might bring upon yourself Swift Destruction! Was David a Sinner at Birth? Checking Facebook feels good, but these ongoing dopamine hits leave you dumber and less able to focus.

Your oldies station sparks up warm memories and good feelings, but shuts you off from new ideas. Your familiar couch keeps you from experiencing the world. And your cozy beliefs limit you from better understanding how things truly are. I recently came upon a theory about nutrition.

It stated that part of why we overeat, is that our bodies are lacking certain nutrients. The notion goes on to suggest that when this happens, our bodies tell us to eat more so we can access those nutrients. Unfortunately, those whose diets are rich in calories, but low in nutrients, continue to eat—without fulfilling this need.

Comfort comes at a price

Nevertheless, I consider it an apt analogy for our lives. For example, social media is high in content calories, but low on informational nutrients. Consumer goods are high in fun calories, but low on fulfillment nutrients. Instant gratification is high in power calories; but low in autonomy nutrients.

So, our credit cards give us the illusion of power, but actually enslave us—having the opposite effect of what we yearned for. Ultimately, we seem to misunderstand our inputs and their effects. Back in my early 20s, I thought orange juice was healthy. This story represents the crux of my argument: I suspect that we simply do not understand what drives us.

Admittedly, this all becomes rather confusing. Our appetites deceive us. The thing we desire right at this moment might not be in our long term best interests. Our mindset also limits us. We seek absolute answers where they simply do not exist. Both happiness and fulfillment are elusive and fleeting—and the steps that lead to either can be paradoxical.

From these observations, a new set of baseline assumptions emerges: This extends to all of our habits and beliefs. With this in mind, testing alternatives seems prudent. Those who are part of it might have good intentions, and afford sensible recommendations; however, these can only be incremental.

Ask a capitalist to explain how an alternative political system might be viable. To gain broader insight, you sometimes need to upend your entire playing surface. Nevertheless, it can lead to altogether new perspectives. For example, you might ask questions like: What if we stopped worrying about growing our company? What if I rented all of my possessions?

What if we paid people to go to school? These ideas are actually quite viable.

• The Whisper Theory;
• We go to lengths to avoid discomfort.
• Work and Fulfillment;
• Editorial Reviews.

Nevertheless, paradigms often change. Heck, at one point radiation and smoking were promoted as healthy. I ask that you challenge some common assumptions. In doing so, you might discover opportunities others miss out on. With this notion of challenging common assumptions, I have a question to ask you. What if, instead of avoiding discomfort, you sought it out? I think you already know this to be true, and simply frame it incorrectly.

Intentional content can be thought of along the lines of a description or set of information that the subject takes to characterize or be applicable to the intentional objects of her thought. Thus, in thinking that there is a red apple in the kitchen the subject entertains a certain presentation of her kitchen and of the apple that she takes to be in it and it is in virtue of this that she succeeds in directing her thought towards these things rather than something else or nothing at all.

It is important to note, however, that for Husserl intentional content is not essentially linguistic.

While intentional content always involves presenting an object in one way rather than another, Husserl maintained that the most basic kinds of intentionality, including perceptual intentionality, are not essentially linguistic. Indeed, for Husserl, meaningful use of language is itself to be analyzed in terms of more fundamental underlying intentional states this can be seen, for example, throughout LI, I. The distinction between intentional object and intentional content can be clarified based on consideration of puzzles from the philosophy of language, such as the puzzle of informative identity statements.

It is quite trivial to be told that Mark Twain is Mark Twain. However, for some people it can be informative and cognitively significant to learn that Mark Twain is Samuel Clemens. The notion of intentional content can be used to explain this. Cases such as this both motivate the distinction between intentional content and intentional object and can be explained in terms of it.

The notion of intentional content as distinct from intentional object is also important in relation to the issue of thought about and reference to non-existent objects. Examples of this include perceptual illusions, thought about fictional objects such as Hamlet or Lilliput, thought about impossible objects such as round-squares, and thought about scientific kinds that turn out not to exist such as phlogiston. Identifying intentional content as a distinct and meaningful element of the structure of intentionality makes it possible for Husserl to explain such cases of meaningful thought about the non-existent in a way similar to that of Gottlob Frege and different from the strategy of his fellow student of Brentano, Alexius Meinong.

Meinong, on the other hand, was driven by his commitment to the thesis of intentionality to posit a special category of objects, the non-existing objects or objects that have Nichtsein , as the intentional objects of such thoughts Meinong For Husserl, such cases involve an intentional act and intentional content where the intentional content does present an intentional object, but there is no real object at all corresponding to the intentional appearance.

However, throughout his work Husserl is able to make use of the distinction between intentional content and intentional object to handle cases of meaningful thought about the non-existent without having to posit, in Meinongian fashion, special categories of non-existent objects. For Husserl, the systematic analysis of these elements of intentionality lies at the heart of the theory of consciousness, as well as, in varying ways, of logic, language and epistemology.

Husserl, notably in agreement with Frege, believed that this view had the undesirable consequences of treating the laws of logic as contingent rather than necessarily true and as being empirically discoverable rather than as known and validated a priori. For Husserl, pure logic is an a priori system of necessary truths governing entailment and explanatory relationships among propositions that does not in any way depend on the existence of human minds for its truth or validity. However, Husserl maintains that the task of developing a human understanding of pure logic requires investigations into the nature of meaning and language, and into the way in which conscious intentional thought is able to comprehend meanings and come to know logical and other truths.

Thus the bulk of a work that is intended to lay the foundations for a theory of logic as a priori, necessary, and completely independent of the composition or activities of the mind is devoted precisely to systematic investigations into the way in which language, meaning, thought, and knowledge are intentionally structured by the mind. While this tension is more apparent than real, it was a major source of criticism directed against the first edition of Logical Investigations , one which Husserl was concerned to clarify and defend himself against in his subsequent writings and in the second edition of the Investigations in In Logical Investigations Husserl developed a view according to which conscious acts are primarily intentional, and a mental act is intentional only in case it has an act-quality and an act-matter.

Introducing this key distinction, Husserl writes:. The one, however, judges one content and the other another content.

Husserl views act-quality, act-matter and act-character as mutually dependent constituents of a concrete particular thought. Just as there cannot be color without saturation, brightness and hue, so for Husserl there cannot be an intentional act without quality, matter and character. The character of an act can be thought of as a contribution of the act-quality that is reflected in the act-matter.

Act-character has to do with whether the content of the act, the act-matter, is posited as existing or as merely thought about and with whether the act-matter is taken as given with evidence fulfillment or without evidence emptily intended. The next two sub-sections deal with act-character and act-matter respectively. It seems clear that the character of an act is ultimately traceable to the act-quality, since it has to do with the way in which an act-matter is thought about rather than with what that act-matter itself presents.

However, it is a contribution of the act-quality that casts a shadow or a halo around the matter, giving the content of the act a distinctive character. This becomes clearer through consideration of particular cases. Consider first positing and non-positing acts. When a subject wonders whether or not the train will be on time, the content or act-matter of her intention is that of the train being on time.

Here what is at issue is the extent to which a subject has evidence of some sort for accepting the content of their intention. At this point the intention is an empty one because it merely contemplates a possible state of affairs for which there is no intuitive experiential evidence.

When the same subject witnesses the sun set later in the day, her intention will either be fulfilled if the sunset matches what she thought it would be like or unfulfilled if the sun set does not match her earlier intention. Importantly, the distinctions between positing and non-positing acts on the one hand and between empty and fulfilled intentions on the other are separate. As noted above, the matter of an intentional act is its content: So the act-matter both determines to what object, if any, a thought refers, and determines how the thought presents that object as being.

For Husserl, the matter of an intentional act does not consist of only linguistic descriptive content. The notion of act-matter is simply that of the significant object-directed mode of an act, and can be perceptual, imaginative, or memorial, linguistic or non-linguistic, particular and indexical, or general, context-neutral and universal. This makes intentionality and intentional content act-matter the fundamental targets of analysis, with the theory of language and expression to be analyzed in terms of these notions rather than the other way around.

Motivated by his anti-psychologism he wants to treat meanings as objective and independent of the minds of particular subjects. However, having done this Husserl also needs to explain how it is that these abstract meanings can play a role in the intentional thought of actual subjects. Whereas Fregean accounts deal with the fact that one individual can have the same thought at different times and different individuals can think about the same thing at any time by positing a single abstract sense that is the numerically identical content of all of their thoughts, Husserl views particular act-matters or contents as instances of ideal act-matter species.

These include the distinction between linguistic types and tokens, the distinction between words and sentences and the meanings that these express, the distinction between sentence meaning and speaker meaning, the meaning and reference of proper names and the function of indexicals and demonstratives.

As noted above, Husserl takes the intentionality of thought to be fundamental and the meaning-expressing and reference fixing capabilities of language to be parasitic on more basic features of intentionality. Husserl is interested in analyzing the meaning and reference of language as part of his project of developing a pure logic. This leads him to focus primarily on declarative sentences from ordinary language, rather than on other kinds of potentially meaningful signs such as the way in which smoke normally indicates or is a sign of fire and gestures such as the way in which a grimace might indicate or convey that someone feels pain or is uncomfortable.

Husserl maintains that the meaning of an expression cannot be identical to the expression for two reasons. Husserl also maintains that the meaning of a linguistic expression cannot be identical with its referent or referents. In support of this Husserl appeals to phenomena such as informative identity statements and meaningful linguistic expressions that have no referent, among others. Thus Husserl, like Frege, distinguishes the meaning of a term or expression both from that term itself and from the object or objects to which the term refers.

A subject who utters this expression to a companion is in an intentional state, which includes an act-matter or intentional content that presents the weather as being cool today. The subject performing the utterance does, in principle, three things for his interlocutor. Second, assuming the interlocutor grasps that this is what is being expressed, her attention will itself be directed to the referent of this ideal sense, namely the state of affairs involving the weather today her act-matter will then also instantiate the relevant ideal act-matter species.

This last point is very important for Husserl. Such expressions have two facets of meaning. Husserl recognizes, however, that the sentences expressing these semantic functions cannot simply be substituted for indexicals without affecting the meaning of sentences containing them. This makes it necessary to identify a second facet or component of indexical content. Husserl thus has a relatively clear understanding of some of the key issues surrounding indexical thought and reference that have been recently discussed in the work of philosophers of language such as John Perry , , as well as an account of how indexical thought and reference works.

In the year Husserl published both a revised edition of Logical Investigations and the Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Philosophy hereafter, Ideas. In the Ideas, Husserl proposes the systematic description and analysis of first person consciousness, focusing on the intentionality of this consciousness, as the fundamental first step in both the theory of consciousness itself and, by extension, in all other areas of philosophy as well.

With hints of the idea already present in the first edition of Logical Investigations , by Husserl has come to see first person consciousness as epistemologically and so logically prior to other forms of knowledge and inquiry. Whereas Descartes took his own conscious awareness to be epistemically basic and then immediately tried to infer, based on his knowledge of this awareness, the existence of a God, an external world, and other knowledge, Husserl takes first-person conscious awareness as epistemically basic and then proposes the systematic study of this consciousness itself as a fundamental philosophical task.

In order to lay the foundations for this project Husserl proposes a methodology known as the phenomenological reduction. The idea behind this is that most people most of the time do not focus their attention on the structure of their experience itself but rather look past this experience and focus their attention and interests on objects and events in the world, which they take to be unproblematically real or existent.