Intentionality and Structure

One of the ambitions of Intentionality is to offer a concept of Consciousness that is an alternative to the Kantian thesis that Consciousness structures its objects. Hence, it insists that Consciousness is a projection towards an object that is independent of it. However, the elaboration of Gestalt structures, by many of the major post-Husserlians, within the Intentionalist concept suggests the limitations of that ambition. For example, on Sartre's analysis, Consciousness distinguishes a 'this' from the rest of a field, without explaining how the item is in-itself discrete from everything else. Indeed, he seems to have no grounds to assert even that Being-in-itself is plural. Hence, even if the In-itself is independent of Consciousness, he has no grounds for asserting that in Intending an object, the discreteness of the latter pre-exists the Consciousness of it. Now, such agnosticism is not necessarily a response to a reduction of the In-itself to the Kantian thing-in-itself. For, while artificial and mechanically-produced items are easily conceivable as in-themselves possessing discreteness, organic phenomena are, where not plainly amorphous, at least relatively lacking in clear differentiation. Thus, plurality in the latter group can only be the product of the extrinsic application of organizational and selective processes. To put it another way, what Intentionality takes to be a simple aiming at a pre-given discrete object, is, in at least some significant instances, the product of a representation of a general manifold in combination with a selection of one aspect of that representation. So, even without reducing the phenomenological In-itself to the Kantian In-itself, Intentional Consciousness constructs, not aims at, at least some of its objects.