INTENTIONAL CONTENT. In the Logical Investigations, Husserl distinguishes three senses of “intentional content”: 1. the intentional object of the act; 2. the (intentional) matter of the act; and 3. the intentional essence of the act.
Intentional content as intentional object can be considered from two different perspectives, that of the object which is intended and that of the object as it is intended. While some commentators understand this distinction in ontological terms, others claim that Husserl does not use these two expressions to denote two different entities—an immanent intentional object and a transcendent intended object—but only to indicate two different ways of considering the object: the intended object simpliciter and the same object considered precisely as intended in the act in question. It is the latter perspective that is the phenomenologically more important, for a descriptive account of experience will necessarily turn its attention to the object as experienced. The distinction between the object which is experienced and the object as experienced also points toward Husserl’s view of the intended object as an identical object manifested in a multiplicity of appearances or presentations. In his discussions of the intentional object Husserl also distinguishes the object taken in its entirety and the partial objects to which are directed the constituent parts of the experience intending the identical object. This distinction points toward Husserl’s use of whole/part analyses in his discussions of various kinds of objects, including and especially those whole/part analyses that appeal to the notion of ‘foundation.’
Intentional content as act-matter is distinguished, first, from the intentional object of the act and, second, from the act-quality. While the quality of the act determines the act’s kind as perceiving, naming, judging, or the like, the matter of the act determines the act as perceiving this, naming this, judging this, and so forth. The matter, in other words, is that moment in the act that accounts for the act’s intending a particular object in a particular manner. The matter accounts for the act’s reference to the object and fixes the object’s significance or sense in a particular way; it is the interpretative or objective sense by virtue of which the object appears or is significant to us in a particular, more or less determinate manner. The distinction between the quality and the matter of an act plays an important role in the Logical Investigations, but Husserl in later works assimilates the notion of matter to that of noematic sense.
Intentional content as intentional essence denotes the unity of quality and matter. Together they form only the essence of the act and not its totality. The act in addition contains as non-essential parts, for example, the contents that are animated or interpreted in the act. The notion of intentional essence as an apprehension animating or interpreting contents plays an important role throughout Husserl’s Logical Investigations, but his view of the structure of intentionality and of how to conceive the relations between the intention and its presenting contents and between the act and its objective sense changes in later works. See also ACT-MATTER; DESCRIPTIVE SCIENCE; HYLETIC DATA; IMMANENCE; NOEMA; REPRESENTING CONTENTS.
