Intentionality (from the Latin intendere, “to direct oneself toward”) denotes the fundamental property of consciousness of always being consciousness of something: the mind is essentially directed toward something, open to reality (cf. Bexten 2017, pp. 259 ff.). From intentionality as an act of consciousness one must distinguish the correlating intentional being: some objects exist only as correlates of intentional acts (such as the literary work of art in Ingarden) — the intentional directedness of consciousness brings them forth as ontologically heteronomous formations. Husserl made intentionality the fundamental concept of phenomenology; Reinach and Scheler developed this approach further. Every act of consciousness — perceiving, thinking, willing, feeling — has an object toward which it is directed. Reason is intentionally directed toward truth; Peter Wust speaks of the “mind taking its measure from things”: cognition orients itself toward the things themselves.
Intentionality belongs to the second dimension of personhood. It is person-behavior, not the ground of being of the person. A human being can be intentionally directed toward the world because he is a person (agere sequitur esse), not the other way around. Interiority and intentionality form the two sides of personal spirituality: self-possession and openness. Edith Stein and Conrad-Martius join phenomenological analysis of intentionality with real ontology.
In love and affirmation, intentionality becomes self-transcendence. The person directs herself toward the other not merely in a cognitive manner, but with her whole being. Wojtyła and Hengstenberg emphasize this loving intentionality as the highest actualization of the actus humanus.
Original and Derived Intentionality
With a view to the AI debate, a distinction is central that John Searle (1980, 1983) coined in continuity with the scholastic doctrine of esse intentionale: original intentionality is grounded intrinsically in the one who performs the act; derived intentionality is the parasitic meaning of maps, texts, and computer programs — it depends on the consciousness of the one who uses them. The person has original intentionality because she bears her own act; a large language model has at most derived intentionality, because its outputs are meaningful for us, not for themselves (Smortchkova/Murez 2024; Strachan et al. 2024).
The scholastic root of the doctrine of intentionality lies in the distinction between prima intentio (German) (a concept of things) and secunda intentio (German) (a concept of concepts). The form, which exists in the mind as esse intentionale and in reality as esse naturale (German), makes cognition possible as a receiving-of-the-form.
Ontological classification: Superordinate concept: consciousness; Modes: original and derived intentionality
Chapter assignment: Chapter 2: Method, Chapter 4: What is human personhood?
Sources: Generated by querying the Personhood ontology.
Further sources:
- Searle, John R. (1980): “Minds, Brains, and Programs.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 3(3), pp. 417–457.
Intentionality is also the decisive objection against the Turing Test: John Searle’s Chinese Room Argument (1980) shows that syntax (formal symbol manipulation) does not suffice for semantics (meaning). Genuine intentionality — the receiving of the form of the known without its matter (Thomas Aquinas) — is fundamentally different from the statistical pattern processing of an AI.