The Phenomenology of Sex, Love, and Intimacy

Susi Ferrarello

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781351123242
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology

The Phenomenology of Sex, Love, and Intimacy presents a phenomenological exploration of love as it manifests itself through sexual desires and intimate relationships. Setting up a unique dialogue between psychology and philosophy, Susi Ferrarello offers a perspective through which clinicians can inform their practice on diverse issues of human sexuality.

Drawing on Husserl's phenomenology, Ferrarello's analysis of love spans a range of disciplines including psychology, theology, biology, epistemology, and axiology, as well as areas related to gender, consent, and political control. Combining Husserlian perspectives on ethics with a focus on lived-experience, this text will deepen therapists' understanding of love as the subject of interdisciplinary inquiry and enable them to locate questions of sexuality and intimacy within an academic framework.

With key theoretical principles included to allow clinicians to think through and clarify their practice, this book will be a valuable tool for sex therapists, marriage and family therapists, and counselors, as well as psychology and philosophy students alike.

1

PRACTICAL INTENTIONALITY AND GEFÜHLSINTENTIONALITÄT

Introduction

In this chapter I will focus on practical intentionality—a term that I believe can positively contribute to the phenomenological analysis of sex, love, and intimacy. I believe that a phenomenological exploration Gemüt¹ (heart),² in particular an Husserlian one, is as important as the analysis of doxische Vernunft (epistemological reason),³ and that the exploration of practical intentionality contributes not only to a balanced view of the relationship between the two, but also to an exploration of feelings and emotions.

Husserl used the expression “practical intention”⁴ (Hua VII, 34) to describe Seinsmeinung, i.e the intention of the being in a knowing act.⁵ Scholars such as Nam-In Lee (2000) and Crowell (2013) have described practical intentionality as an ability to determine matter through Being. Nam-In Lee defined practical intentionality as a form of intentionality that determines every other form of intentionality (2000, 50). In contrast, Crowell defined practical intentionality as “a certain ability-to-be—namely, to be rational, to take responsibility for normative assessment” (2013, 275). An example of practical intention is a New Year’s Eve resolution that you make without necessarily sharing its meaning with anyone else or phrasing it in a sentence.

In particular, in this chapter I will discuss practical intentionality as a form of practical reflection and ‘aiming at’ that is not naïve, and hence does not equate to action (Hua XIX, 358). Like a New Year’s Eve resolution, you do not just decide to act naïvely in one direction or another, but you carefully choose what you are going to do because that is the direction that you propose to take for yourself in the New Year.

I believe that for Husserl, practical intentionality provides the ground for phenomenological ethics (Ferrarello, 2015), as well as the foundation for a meaningful analysis of intimate life. Broadly speaking I believe that practical intentionality can be usefully regarded as closely related to phronesis in that practical intentionality is a form of reflection that comes to expression through wakeful, aware feelings. I will expand upon this definition in the following discussion.

Moreover, I think that psychological analysis can benefit from greater focus upon practical intentionality for three reasons. First, this term gives a name to an important component of the structure of intentionality which otherwise would be neglected The near-invisibility of practical intentionality has led to a blindness in relation to the full range of layers that constitute the decision-making process.⁶ Since practical intentionality does not belong fully to either passive or active intentionality, it can easily be neglected. This means that practical intentionality does not equate with the active decisions we make when we resolve ourselves to a specific direction, neither is it the passive flow in which we stay when we live our lives without being aware of what we are doing; instead, practical intentionality points to that moment of awakening in which we are aware of our body and our self as standing in this flow and decide to validate or not our next move toward a new specific direction. Moreover, from a theoretical point of view, I think that practical intentionality allows us to make visible the wide range of intentional acts mentioned by Husserl in his research.⁷

Second, as Bernet noted in his introduction to Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Syntheses: “intentionality is not a structure that stems one-sidedly from consciousness; it is a dynamic cooperative structure, a constitutive duet” (iii; cf. 52). Looking at intentionality only from an active perspective distorts our ability to describe a phenomenon, for the phenomenon arises from an active and passive determination of matter. Similar to Husserl’s notion of the double apriori (doppelte Apriori, Hua XXXII, 120),⁸ intentionality cannot be conceived of only from its formal side. Rather, it also must be seen from its dynamic and practical side; in fact its practical side provides the clue to explain the dynamic cooperative relationship between active and passive intentionality.⁹ In particular when we examine love we cannot look at the phenomenon of caring for someone from the perspective of the active intentions taken by the subject, because care (as well as many other faces of love) manifests itself through small passive acts that reveal the actual intention of the agent.

Third, I think that an increased focus on practical intentionality would give phenomenologists greater access to the realm of Praxis tout court, for example, “Denkpraxis,” (Hua XLII, 361) or “Geltung Praxis,” (Hua XXXIX, 1).¹⁰ Practical aiming is as important as theoretical aiming in disclosing the realm of lived-experiences. Valuing, as much as thinking, is a form of reasoning that aims at matter in a constitutive way. In Logical Investigations (1901) Husserl writes:

The term intention hits off the peculiarity of acts by imagining them to aim at something and so fits the numerous cases that are naturally and understandably ranked as cases of theoretical and practical aiming. In talking of acts, on the other hand, we must steer clear of the word’s original meaning: all thought of activity must be rigidly excluded.¹¹

Practisches Abzielen (practical reference) does not refer to a natural action; instead, it refers to a practical aiming at—a being consciousness of—that Husserl explains as intentionality in the mode of wakefulness (Hua XLII, 51).

Therefore in what follows I will refer primarily to the Logical Investigations (1901), Ideas (1983/1913), and the Analyses Concerning Passive and Active Synthesis (2001/1859–1938) in order to describe the evolution of Husserl’s thought in relation to the issue of intentionality. This analysis is aimed at providing the theoretical foundations for the phenomenological research that I will pursue in the following chapters.

In what follows I will explain why I consider the insight of practical intentions (Hua VIII, 34) as being already present in Husserl’s writings of 1901, but only later, with the introduction of the genetic method, fully explicated as the meaning of “practical” intentions.¹² In the first part of this chapter I will describe what Husserl means by “intentions.” In the second part I will consider Husserl’s analysis of intentionality in the Logical Investigations, Ideas and the Analyses. Through the examination of this latter, I will explore one specific declension of practical intentionality; namely, affective intentionality.

Intention

I will first seek to describe the constituents of an intentional act and show how intentional activities differ from all forms of natural action. In so doing I will comment on three passages representing three different periods of Husserl’s writing on intentionality and which, taken together, cover the arc of his philosophical career.

In Logical Investigations (1901) Husserl describes intention as “a theoretical and practical aiming at” from which “all thought of activity must be rigidly excluded.”¹³ Intention cannot be confused with action, for it is not equivalent to the natural attitude that we inhabit when we are living spontaneously. Instead, intention is a practical and theoretical aiming at (Beziehung auf) something that seems to transcend us. For this reason in Greek tradition intentionality has been defined as a paron apon (a present absence). When I reflect upon my own intentional acts I set aside the object that is outside of me in order to attend to the object as it is held in my consciousness, an object that no longer possesses the ontological structure of a transcendent object. The meant (intended) object is present to me, but ontologically absent at the same time: a paron apon. For this reason intentionality cannot indicate a mere activity: it attends to the existence of the object not within a natural flow of activities, but rather through a reflective aiming at them. As its Latin etymology indicates, reflection implies a bending ( flector) back (re-) to what has already been lived, and as Husserl wrote, this bending back can be theoretical or practical. Theoretically we can think of something in a reflective way; practically we can feel something in an aware way.¹⁴ I can theoretically decide to get closer to a person, but practically I feel held back. In this case I can engage a theoretical and practical reflection in order to understand why I live in such contrast and it might be that the practical reflection would bring to an answer that is much more reliable than the cognitive one. Unfortunately, today the term reflection is commonly understood in an almost exclusively cognitive sense, which is neglectful of the fact that for ages human beings sought to pursue a form of practical reflection named wisdom or sophia which was held to transcend the cognitive and to comprehend the cognitive into the practical.

Husserl’s characterization of intention in Ideas I (1983/1913) does not differ significantly from Logical Investigations. In Ideas intention is described as “seizing upon (…), objectifying turn, <for example> being turned valuingly to a thing involves (…) a seizing upon the mere thing; not the mere thing but rather the valuable thing” (Hua III, 66). Similarly to the Logical Investigations, what makes intention an intention in the Ideas is the reflective attitude through which we objectify what appears to us. Intention indicates the ability of consciousness to transform undifferentiated matter into a unit of meaning. In the lines just cited from Ideas, the practical seizing of sensuous data is explained through valuing activity.

Finally, in the Anaylses (1859–1938) Husserl describes intention in the following terms:

Intention is (…) a presenting endeavor that wants to realize itself in the continuous acquisition of knowledge, in a fulfilling grasp of the self that is constantly in the process of determining more closely, that is, not just in a mere grasping of the self in general, but rather being interfused, with an endeavor into the moments of the object and to see to what extent they are not yet intuitively realized as grasping the self, in order to bring them to this realization.

(Hua XL, 85)

In the preceding analysis Husserl’s phenomenological description is strongly influenced by his genetic method. Objectivation is described as an ongoing process that involves the self’s efforts to aim at the moments that make the object different from the self. The “endeavour” refers to the ongoing process of differentiation of the self from matter through affections and awakening. In its natural attitude the self is undifferentiated matter. It becomes an egoic self when, affected by matter, the ego awakes and takes a position in relation to the matter while simultaneously giving it a sense. The awakening yields a form of primordial validation, a practical reflection through which consciousness objectifies itself (Hua XL, 221, 277).

This brief analysis of three passages demonstrates that for Husserl the essence of intention lies in its ability to aim at. By “aiming at” Husserl means the capacity to objectivate sensuous data in an intentional unit of sense; that is, to bring the content to its realization by an awake ego. Now let us more closely examine the meaning of intentional essence in the Logical Investigations, Ideas, and Analyses.

Intentional Essence in Logical Investigations

In the first section of the fifth Logical Investigation Husserl defines consciousness as “a comprehensive designation for ‘mental acts’ or ‘intentional experiences’ of all sorts” (Hua XIX, 346; En. 81). He dedicates the following sections to explaining what intentional acts are and what makes them intentional. From sections 20 to 22 he describes the essence of intentional acts meant not as acts in which “we live” (Hua XIX, 411; En. tr. 119) but as the phenomena that appear to us when we reflect on them. An intentional essence is that which makes an act an objectifying one; that is, an act in which the object is presented to us.

The primary structure of an intentional essence is comprised of a correlation of matter and quality. They are unthinkable separately (Hua XIX, 416; En. tr. 122) because quality is the way in which matter presents itself, while matter is that which the quality presents.

Yet, “the intentional essence does not exhaust the act phenomenologically” (Hua XIX, 416; En. tr. 123). We could not speak about intentional essences if “the fullness or vividness of the sensuous contents” (Hua XIX, 415; En...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction: Sorting Out Problems
• 1 Practical Intentionality and Gefühlsintentionalität
• 2 Sex With and Without the Ego
• 3 Perversions
• 4 Introduction to the Phenomenology of Philia
• 5 Forced Intimacy
• 6 Jealousy
• 7 Agape
• 8 Sexual Normality and Intercorporeality
• Index