41 PSYCHOLOGY AS A DOCTRINE ABOUT THE INTENTIONAL ACTS OF CONSCIOUSNESS

An intentional act is the intradirection of consciousness and its functions on a particular subject, regardless of whether the object itself is unknowable or true.

For the first time, the concept of an intentional act was introduced by the Australian philosopher F. Bren-tano. He is the founder of psychology as a theory of psychic phenomena; systematizing them, he distinguishes three central forms:

1) presentation;

2) judgments;

3) emotions.

In F. Brentano, consciousness was first noted as a specific phenomenon. Before him, in modern European psychology of consciousness as such, did not exist, that is, it was not distinguished as a special object of knowledge. In accordance with this theory, psychology is not the content of consciousness (sensations, perceptions, thoughts), according to W. Wundt, but his actions, the mental actions that give rise to these contents. F. Brentano considered a significant symptom of a mental phenomenon to be intentionality (aspiration towards an object).

E. Husserl - a follower of F. Brentano. Consciousness, according to E. Husserl, is a single stream of experiences, through which the object is perceived.

E. Husserl established phenomenology as a theory of rational experiences. What happens in us when we think? The clarity of this issue depends on the requirement of knowledgelessness of knowledge. According to E. Husserl, logical experiences are the latent life of thought in us, without understanding of which an adequate theory of comprehending knowledge is impossible, because to comprehend something without having a clue about how the process of cognition itself is performed means to break through the main rule of the logic of knowledge . The theory of knowledge must be preceded by an analysis of consciousness; the theory of logical experiences grows; therefore, its development exhausts all the problems of phenomenology.

There is a fundamental difference between consciousness and the object of its aspirations. The object lives "outside" of consciousness, and its properties do not regain consciousness from outside; consciousness only “constitutes” it, and in the act itself it deals not with its empirically-material nature, but with the semantic structure, which it itself organizes.

Any phenomenon is characterized by a personal intentional structure, consisting of a large number of intentionally associated components. For example, the perception of a cube represents a single connection between different intentions: the cube “is” in different points of view and perspectives; the visible aspects of his are intentionally compared with the invisible, but planned parties, so that the observation of this whole stream of “aspects” and the nature of their integration shows the presence of a single and holistic knowledge of a stable object in all particular periods of experiences.