Intentionality and Objectification - Husserl and Simmel on the Cognitive and Social Conditions of Experience

Abstract

Husserl’s transcendental turn can be best regarded as a turn in his phenomenological models of intentionality. While in the Logical Investiga¬tions, he maintains a conception according to which intentionality is a struc¬ture of cognitive directedness in which objectification plays a formative role, in his later works the intentional relation is considered as a structure of con-sciousness founded on a sphere of purely subjective interiority. This paper argues that if Husserl had extended the scope of his early phenomenological research to the problems of object formation in the domain of historical and cultural sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), the radical subjectively oriented transformation of his theory of intentionality would have been much more difficult, if not impossible. We also argue that in Simmel’s theory of historical cognition and culture one can detect the elements of a theory of intentionality that can account for what is missing in Husserl, namely the attention devoted to the specific constitution of social and cultural objects. It is precisely the objective mediation through exteriorization and symbolization deployed in social and cultural values, and in historical time that constitutes the specifi¬city of these objects which also conditions subjective experiencing, rather than remains dependent on it.