Growing Intentionality: From Observation to Birthing a Response

Dr Brainerd Prince

This last month, I have been teaching about ‘intentionality’. The word is an abstract noun, and hence is quite distant from our everyday usage. Frequently used terms that are connected to intentionality are ‘intention’ and ‘intentional’. Perhaps, if we looked at the meanings of these familiar words, we might get a glimpse into what intentionality is and what are we to do with it?

Intentional and Intention

We use the term ‘intentional’ for actions that are thoughtfully done. To do something in an intentional manner is not only to give it thought, but also for that action to express our volition or our will and intent. We meant it, and it was not accidental or even obligatory. In intentional acts, we pass on something of us in what we do. A lot of planning goes into intentional acts, making the required preparations so that we can intentionally accomplish the task. The term ‘intention’ on the other hand focuses on the inside. This term expresses our ‘state of mind’ or how we think and perceive things. You can have intentions and not do anything about it. You can keep them hidden. There is another term called ‘authorial intention’ which talks about the thoughts, perspectives, and views that an author passes on in the texts he writes. The debate about authorial intention lies precisely in realizing to what degree can an author’s intention be passed on in the text he writes. Everything that comes out of a person, her acts, her texts, her speech, may not be able to capture her intentions completely, and yet there is a passing on or a crossing over from the inside to the outside – a move from mental intentions to intentional acts in the world.Although, one’s actions in the world, including the texts they write, have a life of their own, once they are birthed, they become in some ways divorced from those who produced them.

With this exploration, we can approach the term ‘intentionality’ with some context and understanding. In some sense, it is something that is primarily within us and still influences what we do outside in the world. And yet, intentionality is something more.

Philosophy of consciousness

In scholarly literature, it was the 19th century Catholic philosopher, Brentano and his student Edmund Husserl, the German-Jewish philosopher who made this term central to their scholarly enterprise. They founded a school of thinking called ‘philosophy of consciousness’, also known as ‘phenomenological philosophy’,that used intentionality as a key concept. Human consciousness is pivotal to this tradition. Their central point was that human consciousness is always ‘a consciousness of’. In other words, it is always conscious ofsomething. Consciousness is not an bounded thing but rather something that is extending outwards all the time. And this attribute or faculty of the consciousness is termed as intentionality. They gave two other terms that capture the essence of intentionality: ‘aboutness’ and ‘directedness’. 

‘Aboutness’ of intentionality

If consciousness is always ‘conscious of’ then ‘what it is conscious about’ determines its ‘aboutness’. As humans we are always conscious of or‘about’ something. We do it naturally. Our consciousness, or our mind, is always receiving information from the world through our senses, particularly sight. You are presently conscious of this article that you are reading, and conscious of the laptop or phone, if you are reading digitally, or conscious of the newspaper in your hands. Furthermore, you are conscious of the place you are in, the people and things around you and the world in which you are currently located. All of this is happening all the time. However, the question is at what degree are you functioning? Are you optimally functioning as a human being with respect to your intentionality. In other words, how much of the world around are you taking in, intentionally. The degree of ‘aboutness’ is different from one person to another. I argue that this is what separates the great’ from the ‘ordinary’. Some have developed the capacity to absorb much more of the world into themselves. They use two skills to achieve this: Observation and Curiosity.

Observation

Observation or simply ‘looking’ is the way humans access and collect the world around them into themselves. We may wrongly think that everyone’s sight is the same. Seeing or looking is not an innocent simple act. There is of course a physiology or a physical aspect to seeing but there is also a cognitive aspect. Seeing or looking requires recognition. Most things become invisible to our eyes when we are unable to name them or recognise them. It's as if our eyes simply gloss over them. The higher our observation skill, more of the world we observe, pay attention to, and capture the details. Some capture more than others. I think we can train ourselves to capture more.

Curiosity

Now to those parts that we don’t recognise or those things that don’t register in us when we are looking and observing – we can either turn our gaze and look away, or we can get curious and enquire about it. Curiosity is another aspect of our consciousness that operates at different degrees in each of us. Some of us are overcurious to such an extent that the adage ‘curiosity killed the cat’ might rightly apply to us, while others are simply not bothered, they never lift their eyes up to look and pursue after with their eyes. Curiosity that enables our spirit of enquiry is an important skill to access the world in its depth. Some things do not lie at the surface and need to be chased after. Being curious increases our ‘aboutness’ as it ensures that we are not only gathering surface level data but also depth and deep information.

‘Directedness’ of intentionality

The second term associated with the intentionality of our consciousness is ‘directedness’. Our consciousness not only gathers what is about, but also has the ability to direct itself toward one or other thing. To direct oneself to something that our ‘aboutness’ has picked up, is to focus our self on a particular from the whole. It is like before crossing the road you scan the entire road – left, right and again left, and as you observe the road, with a focus of crossing it, your eye catches a little girl on the side of the road crying. You have already stepped into the road to cross it, but the sight of the little girl arrests you. Your entire consciousness is now directed at the girl. You are focusing on her. This is called directedness of the consciousness. This directedness is not common or in the same degree to all humans. Some will just cross the road and never look back. Others will look, make sympathetic faces, and yet keep walking. While a few will do something totally different. Our place in the world, our name in the history books totally dependon how we engage with the circumstances that come our way. And guess what – it is our directedness that enables the degree of that engagement. Higher the directedness, higher the engagement. And perhaps we will write out names in the story of time. There are two skills that help us to increase our directedness: deep listening for meaning making and the interrogation of meaning to birth a response.

Deep listening towards meaning making

With every step you take, you are trying to make sense of this sight. Who is this girl? Where are her parents? Why is she alone at the roadside? Why is she crying? Will she run into the road, and perhaps get hit by a vehicle? You may have many more questions and thoughts about what you saw. Your mind is trying to make sense of what you saw. Human and social phenomena are complex and not easy to decipher at first sight. It is only through this process of listening deeply to the world around us, connecting the right dots, making sense of what is going on, that we can convert ordinary, regular, and mundane information and data into opportunities. I want to share a few awesome quotes about opportunities from people who did something with the opportunities they got in life. ‘It is through curiosity and looking at opportunities in new ways that we’ve always mapped our paths’ [Michael Dell]. ‘The entrepreneur always searches for change, responds to it, and exploits it as an opportunity’ [Peter Drucker]. ‘In the middle of difficulty lies opportunity’ [Albert Einstein]. Opportunities don’t present themselves as opportunities, but it is through our reading and meaning making or the practice of intentionality that we can create opportunities.

Interrogation to birth a response

Our minds might dole out many interpretations and meanings of the problem. We need to interrogate them carefully and clinically. A wrong interpretation will lead us back, without us knowing it. Therefore, we rigorously interrogate all our meanings until we are sure that ourinterpretation of the event is in alignment with what actually is going on. When this happens, most often than not, you will find yourself moved to respond. A birthing is about to happen. You are going to respond with a solution for that particular problem, which you can modify and innovate into something that can address the whole class of such problems in the world.

Conclusion

Thus, we can see that the level of aboutness and directedness we possess determines the degree of intentionality we have. Intentionality is not just a natural given, but we can grow it by practising the skills of observation, curiosity, deep listening, and interrogation. In growing our intentionality, our intentions will equally grow stronger,and we will become more intentional in all that we do.

Dr Brainerd Prince is Associate Professor of Practice, and Director, Centre for Thinking, Language and Communication, Plaksha University.