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| Franz Brentano |
The foundation of Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology rests on three concepts: description, phenomenon, and intentionality. Rather than discussing awareness of the world as consciousness, he discusses intentionality. This means that consciousness is not a thing but an attention towards something. Intentionality reveals the paradox that we can think about the concept of nothing. When we think about nothing, “nothing” becomes an intentional concept. Intentionality is the directed awareness of a sensed stimulus (bottom-up processing in cognitive psychology terminology) or an imagined concept (top-down processing). Whereas early experimental psychology focused on the structure of consciousness as a measurable and observable object (Titchener’s structuralism), while Husserl’s phenomenology concentrated on awareness of some object or imagined concept.
Wilhelm Wundt’s concept of apperception seems closer to Husserl’s phenomenology than Titchener’s full-blown structuralism. Wundt seemed to be under the influence of Franz Brentano, whose work Husserl took as the foundation of phenomenology. Reading Wundt’s method of introspection (his method for an “experimental” psychology) reveals striking similarities to Husserl’s epoché or phenomenological reduction. The two methods came to different conclusions, Wundt’s being closer to Kant’s categories that structure conscious experience, and Husserl’s description of the thing in itself. However, both seem to have a strong connection to the earlier work of Franz Brentano.
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| Arthur Schopenhauer |
An interesting parallel exists with a specific form of Buddhist meditation. Receptive meditation found in Zen Buddhism focuses on not thinking. In phenomenological terms, this would be a sort of “shutting off” of intentionality. Not thinking is distinctly different from thinking about nothing. The cessation of thinking is a kind of suspension of intentionality, whereas the thinking about nothing focuses intentionality on “nothing” as a concept. It seems that this Zen move of suspending or bracketing-out intentionality presents as a sort of phenomenological reduction of intentionality itself.
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| Edmund Husserl |
Another interesting aspect of Husserl’s epoché is its comparison to Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy of will and representation. For Schopenhauer, there is an organismic motivation for intentionality, known as the will. Schopenhauer understood the external world as a representation of the mind, shaped by what he referred to as will. In evolutionary terms, the will can be understood as a survival or sex drive, or any other drive towards life. The world is not merely a mental representation of what is being thought about (Husserl’s intentionality), but what is being forced on or thought about is directed by deep drives within us. Another of Franz Brentano’s students, Sigmund Freud, later describes this, calling Schopenhauer’s will, “eros,” and the libidinal drive. Brentano was familiar with Schopenhauer’s thought and mentions him in multiple passages in his text, Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint.
