Husserl and the intentional act.

Spectator#1

Can anyone help me work out what Husserl is doing in the Logical Investigations as regards intentionality? I'm referring to what turned out to be - in the second edition - his decision to pursue phenomenology as a rigorous science of the essences of intentional experience and not merely in the context of grounding logical truths in the instantiation of meanings.
I understand his distinction of the function of expressions/signs etc. Signs only indicate or point to something else eg. smoke - fire, whereas expressions intimate that there is a meaning-intention going on and communicate that meaning.
Ontologically, in the Investigations, meanings are assigned existence as self-identical unities, intersubjectively accessible. This is achieved through the reciprocal relationship of the real and ideal content of a meaning-intention.
The real content is comprised of the act-matter (that which makes it about something) and the act-quality (the mode of interpretation of the matter, ie. judgement etc...)
The Ideal content is the meaning that is instantiated in the fusion of the Real content, the species that is obtained from it.
All meaning intentions refer to an object, the existence of the object is irrelevant, he has already - in the Prologomena - posited the existence of a realm of objectivities or 'irrealia'.
We can understand this as an alternative way of approaching Frege's distinction between Sense and Reference. In Husserl's thought, however, sentences refer not to validity but to states of affairs.
Now my problem here is in applying this to other forms of meaning-intention that do not involve the communication of meanings to others. If I am intending a wine-glass, for example, how does this paradigm fit in? The discussion of the contents of intentional experiences and the fulfillment of them is confusing.
Surely the very idea of meaning intention presupposes the accquisition of some form of meaning prior to the intention of an object? Where does the categorial intuition come into it?
What would be really useful for me is if someone were to furnish a comprehensive example of how the concepts explained in the Logical Investigations fit into a general explanation of the structures of consciousness and not just communication. Husserl is annoyingly stingy with
My other problem with this is understanding just what such a theory would entail. Since he explains the expressive function of speech acts and how they work even in self-dialogue (without the intimation function), is his explanation of the structures of consciousness intended (excuse the pun!) to be a pre-linguistic, pre-conceptual one?

Spectator#1

OK, so let's start from the basics. Who can give an adequate description of an intentional act? Let's say, perceiving a tree in the garden, then making the judgement that it is tall.

I'll try now:

1. I am intending the tree as it stands in my garden in front of me. My perception of the tree only reveals one side of it - an aspect or adumbration - however, my passive, pre-conceptual sensuous intuitions provide me with a full grasp of the object the tree.

2. These intuitions provide part of the matter of the intentional act, the height of the tree is what I am intending and so that comprises the matter of this particular intentional act. The quality of the act is one of judgement - I am generating a judgement on the height of it. This comprises the real content of the meaning-intention.

3. The ideal content instantiated in this act is one of tallness. My categorial intuition tells me that the state of affairs "this tree is tall" holds in this particular case.

4. Because the tree is directly present to me, my meaning-intention is fulfilled in a 'bodily' way. Later I can recall this and the tree will be absent yet I will have a full intuition of what I saw. I can tell someone about the state of affairs I percieved: "that tree was tall" yet if I am not focusing on what I am saying , all I am providing is an empty signification of an intentional-act.

Does anyone have any criticisms of that particular example? Did I leave anything out or mis-use any concepts as laid out in Husserl's thesis?

DadaKopf

I don't remember all the stages of Husserl's theory, but one major criticism tackled by Maurice Merleau-Ponty is that Husserl's phenomenology is idealist. But the mind experiences and understands the world through our bodies. Hence his book, The Phenomenology of Perception, where he deals with embodied existence. M-P also went further than Sartre in this regard because Sartre maintained the solipsistic cogito - the radically individual mind clearly demarcated from body and world - whereas M-P suggested the boundaries between mind, body and world were not only ambiguous, but constantly shifting.

Post-modernists like Derrida attacked Husserl's essentialism and arrived at similar conclusions as Theodor Adorno on the subject of essentialism and positivism, which Husserl espoused.

I think you should read Richard Kearney's book, "Modern European Philosophy", where, in the Husserl chapter, he explains his phenomenology and method very clearly.