MARTINA REUTER

MERLEAU-PONTY’S NOTION OF PRE-REFLECTIVE

INTENTIONALITY∗

ABSTRACT. This article presents an interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s notion of pre-

reflective intentionality, explicating the similarities and differences between his and
Husserl’s understandings of intentionality. The main difference is located in Merleau-
Ponty’s critique of Husserl’s noesis-noema structure. Merleau-Ponty seems to claim that
there can be intentional acts which are not of or about anything specific. He defines in-
tentionality by its “directedness”, which is described as a bodily, concrete spatial motility.
Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of intentionality is part of his attempt to rewrite the re-
lation between the universal and the particular. He claims that meaning is intrinsic to the
phenomenal field and impossible to analyse by a distinction between form and matter. Still,
Merleau-Ponty’s notion of meaning and philosophy is strictly opposed to any naturalized
philosophy. This becomes explicated at the end of the article, where his attempt to embody
intentionality is compared to Daniel Dennett’s corresponding approach.

In this paper I will present an account of Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s notion

of intentionality. Ever since Franz Brentano’s introduction of the concept
of intentionality into contemporary discussions, intentionality and inten-
tional acts have been described by two metaphors, viz., as directed towards
something and as of or about something. Brentano described intentionality
as “reference to a content, direction towards an object” and defined “mental
phenomena by saying that they are those phenomena which contain an ob-
ject intentionally within themselves” (1973, 88–89). Brentano’s definition
has been influential among, if not always uncritically accepted by, philoso-
phers belonging to the analytical as well as the phenomenological tradition
(e.g., Husserl 1913/62, 229; Føllesdal 1984, 31–41; Dennett 1989, 15).
The two metaphors1 of being directed and of or about are usually seen
as describing the same relation, even though the meaning of being directed
towards something and being about something are quite different. I will be
looking at how Merleau-Ponty seems to understand these metaphors and
why he seems to prefer the explication of intentional acts as being directed
towards something, rather than containing an intentional object.
First, I will consider the explicit debt Merleau-Ponty pays to Husserl,
and then I will look at how he describes embodied pre-reflective intention-
ality. I will then explicate the main differences between Merleau-Ponty’s
and Husserl’s understandings of intentionality. I will describe the dis-

Synthese 118: 69–88, 1999.

© 1999 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
70 MARTINA REUTER

tinctions Husserl makes between matter and form and then look at how
Merleau-Ponty criticizes this distinction. Finally, I will briefly try to ex-
plicate some differences between Merleau-Ponty’s approach and another
attempt to embody intentionality that has been made within the framework
of cognitive science by the philosopher Daniel Dennett.

1. OPERATIVE INTENTIONALITY IN THE LIVED WORLD

Merleau-Ponty does not present any theory of intentionality. Instead, he

studies specific intentional acts that are located in the context of other acts
and experiences. Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical starting point is the last
phase of Husserl’s phenomenology, such as it was explicated in The Crisis
of European Sciences (1954/70) and in other at that time unpublished man-
uscripts. He sees Husserl’s recognition of the Lifeworld, the Lebenswelt, as
the most significant insight of phenomenology. As does Husserl, Merleau-
Ponty views the field of perception as the very heart of the Lifeworld.
Phenomenology should give an account of this perceptual experience.
According to Merleau-Ponty and Husserl’s perspective in the Crisis, all
meaning is produced in the encounter between the subject and the already
given world. It is the nature of this encounter that Merleau-Ponty sets out
to study.
In his preface to the Phenomenology of Perception, which is the section
of the book where Merleau-Ponty most explicitly comments on his philo-
sophical heritage, he notes the importance of the distinction Husserl made
between intentionality of act and operative intentionality (fungierende
Intentionalität).2 The intentionality of act is the intentionality of judgings
and other voluntary undertaken positings, while operative intentionality is
“that which produces the natural and antepredicative unity of the world
and of our life” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, xviii; cf. 1960/62, 165).3
Husserl made a distinction between two types of intentional constitu-
tion at many stages of his philosophical development. In the Cartesian
Meditations, he distinguishes active and passive genesis, and writes that in
“active genesis the Ego functions as productively constitutive, by means
of subjective processes that are specifically acts of the Ego” (Husserl
1953/88, 77). Everything created through this activity presupposes a pas-
sivity that gives something beforehand (Husserl, 1953/88, 78). Husserl
recognizes the importance of this passive genesis and characterizes it by
its general principle, association. He compares this association with David
Hume’s principle of association and emphasizes the difference between the
two principles; his own is an intrinsically intentional association (Husserl
1953/88, 80).
 PRE-REFLECTIVE INTENTIONALITY 71

Later on, in The Crisis, this conception of operative intentionality mo-

tivates many of Husserl’s critical claims, for example, when he criticizes
Kant for being unable to grasp the “understanding ruling in concealment,
i.e., ruling as constitutive of the always already developed and always fur-
ther developing meaning-configuration, the ‘intuitively given surrounding
world’ ” (Husserl 1954/70, 104). According to Husserl, Kant’s inquiries in
the Critique of Pure Reason have an unquestioned ground of presupposi-
tions which codetermine the meaning of his questions. Kant presupposes
the everyday surrounding world of life as existing, and this presupposi-
tion leaves the structure of the lived world and its operative intentionality
unexplicated.
Merleau-Ponty is mainly focusing on the mode of intentionality that
Husserl conceptualizes as operative intentionality. According to him, this
intentionality is more clearly “apparent in our desires, our evaluations and
the landscape we see, . . . than in objective knowledge”. Operative inten-
tionality furnishes “the text which our knowledge tries to translate into
precise language” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, xviii). Operative intentionality
is the intentionality of the lived world. This broad notion of intention-
ality distinguishes phenomenological ‘comprehension’ from traditional
‘intellection’ or reflection. Operative intentionality is the intentionality of
phenomenological comprehension.
In comprehensive understanding the whole intention active, for exam-
ple, in the perception of a thing or a historical event, is comprehended.
Merleau-Ponty compares this understanding to the finding of the Idea in a
Hegelian sense, but this Idea includes very tangible and material aspects
such as “the unique mode of existing expressed in the properties of the peb-
ble, the glass or the piece of wax” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, xviii). Most
important is that phenomenological comprehension makes a ‘phenom-
enology of origins’ possible, i.e., an understanding of this comprehension
unveils how the world appears to us.
Merleau-Ponty distinguishes comprehensive understanding from
knowledge concerning only what things are for representation, i.e., the
‘properties’ of things perceived, the mass of ‘historical facts’ or the ‘ideas’
of a doctrine. That is, he distinguishes phenomenological understand-
ing from the knowledge of objective thought, of empiricism as well as
of intellectualism.

2. INTENTIONALITY AS PRE - REFLECTIVE MOTILITY

Husserl’s main contribution to phenomenology was, according to Merleau-

Ponty, his introduction of operative intentionality. Merleau-Ponty takes as
72 MARTINA REUTER

his own task to show how this intentionality is essentially intentionality

of the body-subject. Merleau-Ponty’s basic intentionality is the body-
subject’s concrete, spatial and pre-reflective directedness towards the lived
world. The pre-reflective moving body is in itself intentional, “reaching out
towards the world”. In order to understand intentionality, it is important not
to abstract the mind from the body, but to see how they are intertwined.
The body here is not the physiological abstraction of the natural sciences,
but the lived and experienced body. Using Descartes’s terminology, one
may say that the lived body is as well extended as thinking, or rather
that it precedes any distinction or union between the two. Commenting
on Merleau-Ponty’s view of the original incarnation of thought, prior to
any theoretical or practical position, Emmanuel Levinas points out that
this original incarnation is prior also to any synthesis between res extensa
and res cogitans (1983/94, 97).
Martin C. Dillon has pointed out that though intentional, Merleau-
Ponty’s lived body does not function as the transcendental ego of Kant
or Husserl, i.e., it is not the sole foundation of meaning. The body has a
meaning-bestowing function, grounded in its motility and perceptual syn-
thesis, but that is only one part of the constituting process. The world is also
questioning the body-subject, and motility is a response to the questions of
the world. Dillon emphasizes that the “active, constituting, centrifugal role
of the body, its transcendental operation, is inconceivable apart from its
receptive, responsive, centripetal role before the givenness of the world”
(Dillon 1988, 146).
Spatial motility is at the bottom of all forms of intentionality, accord-
ing to Merleau-Ponty, while symbolic level intentionality depends on this
basic intentionality. Merleau-Ponty’s theory of intentionality can perhaps
be seen as an attempt to render the metaphor describing intentionality as
‘directedness towards things’ concrete. Intentionality is a concrete spatial
direction of an attitude or posture towards objects as they appear in the
world.
Merleau-Ponty’s description of embodied basic intentionality is based
on his critique of the conception of the human body as a physical object
among other objects. The human body, or, according to Merleau-Ponty’s
way of description, my body, is never a fragment of extended matter, and
this lived body does not occupy any fragment of space (Merleau-Ponty
1945/62, 102). In fact, there would not be any space for me, if I did not
have a body.4 In this sense our body constitutes our space, but the body-
subject is not a sufficient condition for the existence of space. The given
world is also required.
 PRE-REFLECTIVE INTENTIONALITY 73

The human body is, strictly speaking, not in space (or time), according
to Merleau-Ponty, but we inhabit space and time (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62,
139). Bodily space and external space form a practical system, in which
bodily space is the background against which objects may stand out –
they become visible and function as goals for action. This means that
bodily being in space makes directed projects possible. This directed or
intentional spatiality is essentially motility, and from this it follows that an
understanding of space requires an analysis of movement.
Merleau-Ponty analyses motility by studying basic bodily movement,
such as grasping vs. pointing at one’s nose. He does this through an analy-
sis of deviant cases, described in psychological and neurophysiological
studies, showing how the study of impaired abilities manifests features of
bodily actions which are not recognizable in “normal” cases. This analysis
is a dialectical critique of empiricist as well as of intellectualist models
of explanation. Merleau-Ponty’s aim is to show that movement cannot be
understood by an analysis of stimuli and reaction.
Merleau-Ponty analysed the case of Schneider, a war veteran who was
wounded by a shell splinter in the back of his head and suffered from what
traditional psychiatry called “psychic blindness”. Schneider experienced
great problems when performing abstract movements at command, such
as pointing at his nose when the doctor asked him to, but “the patient
performs with extraordinary speed and precision the movements needed
in living his life, provided that he is in the habit of performing them:
he takes his handkerchief from his pocket and blows his nose, takes a
match out of a box and lights a lamp” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 103).
The differences between abstract and concrete movement shown by these
examples cannot be given a neurophysiological explanation, because an
abstract and a concrete movement may physiologically be exactly the
same. According to Merleau-Ponty, the injury affected Schneider’s lived
world. Schneider experienced concrete situations as given and was able to
act in them, but he was unable to ‘project’ a situation for himself in the
way needed for smoothly performed abstract movement (Merleau-Ponty
1945/62, 110–112).
Merleau-Ponty shows that body movement cannot be understood either
as causal physiological reactions, as empiricist explanations claim, or as
directed by conscious intentions, as cognitivist psychology understands
it. Motility is not merely physiological and it is not the ‘handmaid’ of
consciousness. Neither is a combination of cognitivist and physiologi-
cal explanations sufficient. The distinction between concrete and abstract
movement cannot be understood by relating certain movements to physi-
ological mechanisms and others to consciousness; the distinction between
74 MARTINA REUTER

concrete and abstract should not be confused with the distinction between
body and consciousness. The difference between concrete and abstract
does not belong to the reflective dimension, which separates the conscious
from the bodily, “but finds its place only in the behavioural dimension”
(Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 124). There is meaning involved here, accord-
ing to Merleau-Ponty, and motility can be understood only through its
intentionality.
Schneider’s inabilities cannot be explained by the ‘objective thought’
shared by empiricists and intellectualists; these inabilities can only be
given a phenomenological description and understood by the phenomeno-
logical concept of intentionality. Schneider’s inability to project a situation
for his actions makes visible what Merleau-Ponty calls the intentional arc.
This intentional arc is inseparably motion, vision and comprehension; it is
prior to the separation of different abilities. As an unitary ability, the in-
tentional arc situates human subjects in relation to their space, past, future,
human setting, physical, ideological and moral situation.5 The intentional
arc is a fundamental function which underlies other separate functions
such as movement, perception or intelligence. It brings about the unity
of the senses, of motility and intelligence. In the case of Schneider, as
in other cases of impaired abilities, it was this arc which “went limp”
(Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 135–136; cf. Langer 1989, 46).
There is an ambiguity in Merleau-Ponty’s claim here. In one context he
concludes that “motility is basic intentionality” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62,
137), while the intentional arc is described as a function underlying all
separate abilities, i.e., also motility. This could be understood so that
motility is the most basic experienced or observable form of intention-
ality. This form is more basic than, for example, observations about our
mental states. As a function underlying all separate functions, the inten-
tional arc is a hypothetical abstraction, abstracted from observable forms
of intentionality.6
Merleau-Ponty’s explicit discussions of intentionality mainly involve
basic levels of spatial motion and perception, but he also draws on some
examples involving habitual skills. His main example is drawn from an ex-
perienced organist who is able, after only one hour of practice, to perform
his program on an unfamiliar organ with more or fewer manuals than the
one he is used to. This ability can not be due to an intellectual study of
various manuals, nor to the training of new reflexes, as the intellectualist
and the empiricist, respectively, would claim. Instead, the organist com-
prehends the organ on a pre-reflective level and makes it part of his project
to perform the music (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 144–145).
 PRE-REFLECTIVE INTENTIONALITY 75

3. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE ‘ DIRECTEDNESS ’ ASPECT

Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intentionality focuses on the ways in which

persons are directed towards their world. Intentional acts are primarily
directed toward the lived world as a whole and the phenomenon of in-
tentionality is understandable only through its pre-reflective ability to be
directed. This intentionality does not require the existence of any other
objects – real or intentional – than the given world (or the ‘project of
existence’, if one wants to give this an existentialist flavour). Through
this directedness separate intentional objects or phenomena emerge, and
Merleau-Ponty’s theory of perception is mainly a discussion of how this
happens and what these objects are like.
Merleau-Ponty discusses the nature of intentional acts and objects at a
concrete level; most elaboratedly in his studies of how perceptual phenom-
ena emerge, but also in connection with language, other types of action,
and inter-subjectivity. He does not define intentional acts as having con-
tent. His notion of the intentional arc can be seen as an attempt to provide
a structural understanding of the directedness of intentionality, but he does
not separately discuss the structure of its aboutness. Merleau-Ponty com-
ments on the idea of an intentional content mainly when he claims what
it is not. The absence of a discussion about intentional content constitutes
an important difference between the phenomenologies of Merleau-Ponty
and Husserl, whose philosophy, especially in the middle phase of Ideas
and Cartesian Meditations, placed great importance on the study of the
noema, i.e., the content of experience or intentional object.7
Intentional content is not composed of mental representations, accord-
ing to Merleau-Ponty. This point was clearly made already by Husserl,
who in Ideas I claimed that the ascription of a representative function to
perception and other intentional experience brings about an endless regress
(Husserl 1913/62, 243).8 This is so because, if the intentional object is a
representation of a real object, then one is beset with the problem of how
two realities, one mental and one external, can confront each other, espe-
cially when only one of these is present and possible. The representation
would have to be taken as the real object and then represented again in a
second-order intentional act. This gives rise to an infinite regress without
solving the fundamental problem about how the immanent and the real
objects are related to each other.9
Husserl emphasized that intentional acts are about real objects, i.e.,
about what is given in experience. These real objects should then be
“bracketed”, but this phenomenological reduction does not mean that their
reality is thrown away, or still less that the objects are transferred inside
76 MARTINA REUTER

the mind. The phenomenologist may not make judgements that rely on the
affirmation of a transcendent nature, but she or he may make judgements
to the effect that perception is the consciousness of a real world (Husserl
1913/62, 244).
According to Merleau-Ponty, consciousness should not be understood
as explicit positing of its objects, but as a more ambiguous reference to
a practical object; as being-in-the-world (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 139).
This does not mean that pre-reflective intentionality is unconscious. Dis-
cussing love, experienced before explicit awareness of its nature, Merleau-
Ponty concludes that, this love was not “a thing hidden in my unconscious-
ness;” it was not something I was unaware of. But this love was not “an
object before my consciousness” either. It was “the impulse carrying me
towards someone” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 381). The love of this exam-
ple is a directed act of awareness, but it does not have a distinct intentional
object, or noema in Husserl’s terminology. It is a pre-reflective intentional
act in the sense that it is directed without allowing for a reflective under-
standing of either the manner in which it is directed or the object towards
which the unspecific awareness is directed.10
In his understanding of intentionality, Merleau-Ponty seems to separate
the aspects of being directed and being of or about. Being directed is a
necessary condition for an intentional act, while this act may or may not
have a distinguishable intentional object. The body as subject is directed
towards the world and can in this way get in touch with phenomena that
emerge through this act. This process is the basis for all more complex
mental acts.
So, Merleau-Ponty seems to claim that there can be intentional acts
which are not of or about anything specific, i.e., which do not have a
noesis-noema structure. This separates Merleau-Ponty from the contempo-
rary analytical (also analytical pro phenomenology) view on intentionality,
which sees being directed and being about or of as the same thing; i.e.,
intentional states are directed because they are about something. For ex-
ample, Dagfinn Føllesdal, in one interpretation of Husserl’s notion of
intentionality, writes that; “To be directed simply is to have a noema”
(Føllesdal 1984, 4).11
Merleau-Ponty can perhaps be seen to motivate his emphasis on di-
rect ‘directedness’ in the preface to Phenomenology of Perception, where
he writes, “ ‘All consciousness is consciousness of something’; there is
nothing new in that. Kant showed [. . .] that inner perception is impossible
without outer perception, that the world, as a collection of connected phe-
nomena, is anticipated in the consciousness of my unity, and is the means
whereby I come into being as a consciousness” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62,
 PRE-REFLECTIVE INTENTIONALITY 77

xvii). Merleau-Ponty continues by explaining that the unity of the world,

lived as ready-made before it is posited by knowledge in any specific act of
identification, is what distinguishes the phenomenological notion of inten-
tionality from the Kantian relation to a possible object. Thus, specific for
phenomenology and its understanding of intentionality is the recognition it
gives to the pre-reflective given-ness of the world. This given-ness means
that the subject is pre-reflectively directed towards the world. The most
important task for phenomenology is to understand the true nature of the
pre-reflective.

4. PREGNANT MATTER AND INCARNATE SUBJECTS

Merleau-Ponty undertakes little direct critique of Husserl in his Phe-

nomenology of Perception, but he makes some critical comments on the
phenomenology of Husserl’s second period, i.e., the phenomenology of the
Ideas (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 60, 243). On the explicit level, Merleau-
Ponty mainly sees Husserl’s position as incomplete.12 Husserl was unable
to explicate the nature of the relationship between pre-reflective inten-
tionality and the given world, and Merleau-Ponty introduces the insights
of Gestalt psychology in order to continue Husserl’s project. Accord-
ing to Merleau-Ponty, some problematic internal tensions in Husserl’s
phenomenological project are related to the distinction between the con-
stituting intentional act, noesis,13 and the intentional object, the noema
(Merleau-Ponty 1960/64, 165).
The analysis of the noesis-noema structure is an essential part of
Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology as it is presented in the Ideas I.
In his study of the intentional act, noesis, Husserl distinguishes between a
material and a noetic side of phenomenological being. The material should
be studied by hyletically phenomenological reflexions and analyses, while
the reflexions and analyses relating to noetic phases are named noetically
phenomenological. Husserl states that, “[t]he incomparably more impor-
tant and fruitful analyses belong to the noetical side” (Husserl 1913/62,
230).
The distinction between the noetic and the material is developed out of
the distinction Husserl makes between genuine intentional experience and
unitary sensile experiences. These latter experiences are sensory contents,
such as color, touch and sound, or sensile impressions, such as pain or plea-
sure, and they are components of more comprehensive experiences which
are intentional, but they are not in themselves intentional. The concrete
intentional experience takes form and shape through the agency of an an-
78 MARTINA REUTER

imating or “meaning-bestowing” stratum, lying over the sensile elements

(Husserl 1913/62, 226–227).
What Husserl does is to give a new phenomenological expression to
the distinction between matter and form. Husserl is very explicit on this
and he describes the sensile with the Greek word for matter, hyle, and
the intentional with the word for form or shape, morphe. The “remarkable
duality and unity” of these two components gives rise to the whole of the
phenomenological domain. Intentional experiences are a unity of matter
and form, and they come to being when sensible data “offer themselves
as material for intentional informings or bestowals of meaning at different
levels” (Husserl 1913/62, 227).14
Merleau-Ponty’s purpose is to show that intentionality does not present
things composed of distinguishable form and matter. Taking hold of claims
made by Husserl in Ideas II, where he questions the possibility of distin-
guishing components of experience, Merleau-Ponty tries to develop this
line of thinking further. In an essay on Husserl in the collection Signs,
he points out that “perhaps we do not have to think about the world and
ourselves in terms of the bifurcation of Nature and mind” (1960/64, 162).
Merleau-Ponty continues by claiming that, from Husserl’s Ideas II on, it
seems “clear that reflection does not install us in a closed, transparent mi-
lieu, and that it does not take us (at least not immediately) from “objective”
to “subjective”, but that its function is rather to unveil a third dimension
in which this distinction becomes problematic” (Merleau-Ponty 1960/64,
162). Merleau-Ponty wants to study this third dimension.
According to Merleau-Ponty, subjects living in the world come in
touch with emerging phenomena, in themselves “matter pregnant with
form”.15 Merleau-Ponty based his conclusions on a dialectical combina-
tion of Husserl’s phenomenology and the insights of Gestalt psychology,
especially the Gestaltist claim about the figure-on-a-background as the
most basic unit of experience. Gestalt psychologists showed that there are
neither any perceptual atoms postulated by empirists nor any Husserlian
hyletic data (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 3–5; cf. Dillon 1988, 58–60). As
the second step of this dialectical combination, Merleau-Ponty used the
phenomenological reduction introduced by Husserl in order to “bracket”
the naturalism of scientific Gestalt psychology.16
The synthesis between Gestalt psychology and phenomenology shows
that phenomena, as Gestalt, do not appear by the external unfolding of
some pre-existing reason or law, as is argued by different forms of tran-
scendental philosophy, also by Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology.
There is no pre-existing model on which phenomena are built up, no form
(morphe) in that sense. This means that, according to Merleau-Ponty, there
 PRE-REFLECTIVE INTENTIONALITY 79

are no standardized or pre-existent qualities, or other types of Husserlian

positional characters. The phenomena can be seen as a kind of form, but
this form is, according to Merleau-Ponty, “the very appearance of the
world and not the condition of its possibility; it is the birth of a norm and
is not realized according to a norm; it is the identity of the external and the
internal and not the projection of the internal in the external” (Merleau-
Ponty 1945/62, 61). Merleau-Ponty claims that meaning is intrinsic to the
phenomenal field, and this claim is a phenomenological derivation of the
Gestalt psychologist claim that organization is intrinsic to the perceptual
field (cf. Dillon 1988, 65–66).
Merleau-Ponty’s perspective is illuminated by a comparison between
his position and the position of his contemporary Aron Gurwitsch, who
also criticized Husserl’s distinction between morphe and hyle with the help
of the findings of Gestalt psychologists. Gurwitsch claims that this distinc-
tion cannot be made even at a conceptual level. In the spirit of Gestalt
psychology he points out that understanding requires the signs which are
to be understood to have a certain physiognomy, which means that they
have to be articulated in a specific way, even as “physical” objects.
Gurwitsch explicates his point with the help of an example concerning
Chinese letters: If Chinese letters are presented to one person who knows
Chinese and one who does not, the difference between the two perceptive
acts is not only that the first person understands and the second does not.
The letters also look different in front of the two persons. This means that
what is immediately given to the two persons is not the same object. Gur-
witsch continues, “[h]olding that hyletic data are organized and articulated
by meaning-bestowing and understanding acts, one cannot say that the
appearance of the word on paper as a physical event is, with respect to
its sensuous aspect, left unchanged by the animating acts. In this case, the
mental aspect of the expression forms and articulates its physical aspect”
(Gurwitsch 1966, 255). In order to take this into account, Husserl, claiming
that hyle in itself is formless, would have to assume a third noetic interme-
diary stratum between the sensuous hyletic and the meaning-bestowing
act. Gurwitsch claims that even if Husserl would make this assumption,
he still has the problem whether hyletic data, with respect to their “sensu-
ous appearance”, really remain unchanged with regard to different noeses
operating upon them.
Gurwitsch’s example suggests that there is no clear distinction between
the matter and the content of the letter: Our understanding or non-
understanding of the content affects the material shape of the letter in front
of us.17 In his interpretation of Husserl’s noema, Gurwitsch identified sense
and appearance and claimed that the perceptual noema is a concrete sen-
80 MARTINA REUTER

suous appearance, in which the phenomenological primal material is given

only as articulated and structured. But, Gurwitsch still remained within
a transcendental mode of understanding and did not abandon Husserl’s
thesis of the atemporality of meaning or the Husserlian distinction between
noesis and noema (cf. Dillon 1988, 71). In agreement with Merleau-Ponty,
he claimed that the sense of perceptual acts is incorporated and incarnated
in the very appearances themselves (cf. Dreyfus 1982, 117), but he did not
incarnate the meaning-giving subject in a corresponding way. This made it
impossible for his subject to exist with the perceived objects and participate
in the constitution of perceptual meaning, and according to Hubert Drey-
fus, Gurwitsch was forced to reinterpret the noesis as a simple experiencing
of the presented Gestalts or noema-appearances (Dreyfus 1982, 121).
Merleau-Ponty’s perspective is based on his notion of the intentional
body-subject, bestowing meaning while it is present with other objects in
the field. He is explicit in his critique of what he characterizes as Husserl’s
idealist position in the Ideas I. Merleau-Ponty writes that it is “charac-
teristic of idealism to grant that all significance is centrifugal, being an
act of significance or Sinn-gebung, and that there are no natural signs.
To understand is ultimately always to construct, to constitute, to bring
about here and now the synthesis of the object. Our analysis of one’s own
body and of perception has revealed to us a relation to the object, i.e., a
significance deeper than this” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 428–429). Here,
beneath the intentionality of judgings or acts, Merleau-Ponty finds oper-
ative intentionality. He claims that every active process of signification,
every Sinn-gebung, is derivative and secondary in relation to the “preg-
nancy of meaning within signs which could serve to define the world”
(Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 429). In Signs, Merleau-Ponty also discusses
this “pre-theoretical constitution” which accounts for pre-given kernels of
meaning. Concerning these pre-givens it may as well be said that they are
already constituted for us, or that they are never completely constituted.
This means that “consciousness is always behind or ahead of them, never
contemporaneous” (Merleau-Ponty 1960/64, 165). This process of consti-
tuting does not take place by “grasping a content as an exemplification of
a meaning or an essence” and the process “could not possibly reach com-
pletion in the intellectual possession of a noema” (Merleau-Ponty 1960/64,
165). Merleau-Ponty concludes that there is “an ordered sequence of steps,
but it is without end as it is without beginning” (Merleau-Ponty 1960/64,
165).18
Meaning is at the same time universal and temporal. In perception and
understanding, the subject brings her or his sensory field and perceptual
field with her or him, and in the last resort, “I bring a schema of all possible
 PRE-REFLECTIVE INTENTIONALITY 81

being, a universal setting in relation to the world” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62,

429). This universal setting is the phenomenal field. It is important to
observe that the phenomenal field is a phenomenological derivation, it is
not a natural structure or organic trait. I think that the phenomenal field
should be seen as Merleau-Ponty’s interpretation of Husserl’s notion of
the transcendental structure of the Lifeworld.
Husserl’s Lifeworld, as it is explicated in The Crisis, has a general
structure, that transgresses culturally diverse facts and truths.19 Different
Lifeworlds contain different objects, but these worlds have a general struc-
ture through which their objects can be identified as objects of a Lifeworld.
According to Husserl, this “general structure, to which everything that
exists relatively is bound, is not itself relative” (1954/70, 139). The most
general trait of the Lifeworld is its spatio-temporality. Husserl emphasizes
that this spatio-temporality is not a question of ideal mathematical points,
“pure” straight lines or planes, or the Kantian geometrical a priori. The
actual bodies of the Lifeworld are not bodies in the sense of physics. The
categorical features of the Lifeworld are not concerned with the theoretical
idealizations of the geometrician or the physicist, but forms a Lifeworld
a priori, which is the basis for mathematical and other objective a priori
(Husserl 1954/70, 140).
There is no reason to think that Merleau-Ponty abandoned this general-
ity of the Lifeworld, and he is explicit in describing the phenomenal field
as a universal setting. Through the a priori of the Lifeworld, Merleau-
Ponty relates himself to a transcendental phenomenological framework.
He emphasizes the complex nature of the relation between the natural and
the transcendental displayed by a phenomenological reduction which is
never completed and which does not reveal fixed essences. The natural
and transcendental attitudes do not exist side by side or sequentially, like
the false or apparent and the true. In Signs, he writes that it “is the natural
attitude itself which goes beyond itself in phenomenology – and so it does
not go beyond itself” (Merleau-Ponty 1960/64, 164).
In a short reflection on the philosophical relation between Merleau-
Ponty and himself, Gurwitsch (1966, n349) points out that Merleau-
Ponty does not undertake any analysis of perception with respect to the
noetico-noematic structure, but has instead related perception to the ‘corps
phénoménal’, which Gurwitsch translates as the organism. According to
Gurwitsch, Merleau-Ponty refers the structure of perception to corporeal
organization. Gurwitsch’s interpretation of the phenomenological body as
an organism seems to detach it from its setting in the Lifeworld and transfer
it into a biologistic approach. I think this is a mistaken interpretation of the
corps phénoménal.
82 MARTINA REUTER

Instead, I would say that Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of how the

subject participates in the generation of meaning saves him from Gur-
witsch’s strained conclusions about a passive subject. Merleau-Ponty took
the trouble of showing how the noesis, the meaning-giving activity of the
subject, is an intrinsically incarnate process which introduces the subject to
likewise intrinsically meaningful phenomena in the lived world. Merleau-
Ponty’s notion of bodily pre-reflective intentionality saved his subject from
being reduced to a mere passive receiver.

5. MERLEAU - PONTY VS . DENNETT

Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological anti-naturalism constitutes one main

difference between his approach and most attempts to embody intention-
ality from the perspectives of analytical philosophy and cognitive science.
In this concluding section of my paper I will try to illuminate these differ-
ences by comparing Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological analysis with the
approach presented by Daniel Dennett. Dennett’s position is perhaps not
the philosophically most sophisticated one, but I have chosen it because
it is commonsensical by nature and has become rather influential outside
strictly philosophical circles, e.g., among cognitive scientists.
Dennett takes an explicitly unphenomenological position when he de-
fines his own – as he calls it – tactical choice. He declares his “starting
point to be the objective, materialistic, third-person world of the physical
sciences” (1989, 5), and emphasizes that philosophy is allied and contin-
uous with these sciences. He wants to see what the mind looks like from
the third-person, materialistic perspective of science, and he is ready to
bet on this being the best perspective for a contemporary understanding
of mental phenomena. We are told that this conviction is not just built on
prejudice, as Dennet has “shopped around” (1989, 7) – presumably also in
the supermarket of phenomenology.
At some points Dennett comments on the relationship between his
intentional stance and phenomenology. The main difference lies in the
first-person perspective of phenomenology vs. the third-person perspective
of Dennett. Dennett writes that, “[w]hereas Phenomenologists propose that
one can get to one’s own notional world by some special somewhat intro-
spectionist bit of mental gymnastics – called, by some, the phenomenolog-
ical reduction – we are concerned with determining the notional world of
another, from the outside” (1989, 153). According to Dennett, the tradition
represented by Brentano and Husserl is a solipsistic auto-phenomenology,
whereas he himself proposes an objective hetero-phenomenology.
Dennett’s rejection of a first-person perspective as meaningless is Wittgen-
 PRE-REFLECTIVE INTENTIONALITY 83

steinian in spirit, but he does not develop the philosophical implications of

this line of thought. He adopts a scientific third-person perspective instead
of elaborating his Wittgensteinian intuitions.
The difference between first- and third-person perspectives is related
to the genuine difference between a Dennettian and a phenomenological
perspective, i.e., the difference between seeing philosophy as continuous
with science vs. seeing philosophy as concerned with the foundations of
science. I will focus on some differences between first- vs. third-person
perspectives from this point of view.
Dennett’s intentional stance is based on the attribution of intentional-
ity: A third-person observer attributes intentionality to a system when its
actions are best predicted and explained by this strategy (1989, 23–25).
From Dennett’s point of view this is the most complete description we
can get of intentionality, nothing can be added by an additionally first-
person perspective. The process of attribution in itself involves a subjective
step when the observer takes the “decision to adopt the intentional stance”
(Dennett 1989, 24), but this does not destroy the credibility of the stance,
according to Dennett, because “the facts about the success or failure of the
stance, were one to adopt it, are perfectly objective” (Dennett 1989, 24).
From Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological point of view, Dennett’s
stance belongs to the realm of objective thought, characteristic of em-
piricism as well as intellectualism. This stance reduces the “intentional
system” to an observable physical object, moved by different causes, one
of which is the intentionality attributed to the system by the observer. This
is not the perspective from which we may understand intentionality, nei-
ther as it is displayed in basic bodily movements nor in complex human
actions, according to Merleau-Ponty. For him the first-person perspective
is irreducible.
Discussing the possibility of freedom at the end of his Phenomenology
of Perception, Merleau-Ponty emphasizes the importance of separating
lived self-definition from third-person characterizations of human lives and
experiences. The experience of being “hunchbacked” or “jealous” remains
significantly different from any external description of these experiences.
Merleau-Ponty writes that, “[u]ntil the final coma, the dying man is inhab-
ited by a consciousness, he is all that he sees, and enjoys this much of an
outlet. Consciousness can never objectify itself into invalid-consciousness
or cripple-consciousness, and even if the old man complains of his age
or the cripple of his deformity, they can do so only by comparing them-
selves with others, or seeing themselves through the eyes of others, that
is, by taking a statistical and objective view of themselves, so that such
complaints are never absolutely genuine” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 434).
84 MARTINA REUTER

Dennett’s intentional stance belongs to the realm of objective explanation

and statistical prediction, it is an external description of human behavior
which does not grasp the genuine part of intentional experience.
Dennett’s stance in itself does not tell us what intentionality is, it only
shows us how intentionality functions in a certain setting. Following the
Wittgensteinian vein in Dennett’s thinking one might be satisfied with
this and claim that the issue is resolved. But, Dennett also provides a
definition of the intentionality attributed to observed systems. Dennett de-
fines intentionality in relation to beliefs: an intentional system is a true
believer (Dennett 1989, 15). This notion of intentionality is significantly
narrower than Merleau-Ponty’s notion of pre-reflective intentionality, or
Husserl’s notion, which is composed of the intentionality of act and oper-
ative intentionality.20 The intentionality of perception is an essential part
of the phenomenological notion of intentionality, but this aspect is left out
of Dennett’s belief-centered definition. His attribution of intentionality is
restricted to the attribution of beliefs and does not include, for example,
the attribution of meaningful perception. This is perhaps the most crucial
problem for Dennett’s strategy of embodying intentionality.
Dennett expands and embodies intentionality in the sense that he is able
to attribute it to clams and thermostats, but his understanding of which
kind of mental states may be intentional remains narrow. His notion of
intentionality is intellectualist in the sense that intentionality is restricted to
the intentionality of judgemental attitudes. The beliefs of intentional sys-
tems might be unconscious – or even held by systems which lack any type
of consciousness – but these beliefs are still explicated as propositional
attitudes.

6. CONCLUSION

Merleau-Ponty and Dennett both try to show how embodied beings are
intentional, but their strategies for doing this are quite different. Merleau-
Ponty takes Husserl’s notion of operative intentionality as his starting
point and shows how this pre-reflective intentionality is embodied as a
posture vis-à-vis the world. He continues the strain in Husserl’s thinking
that attempts to study consciousness outside a strictly intellectualist frame-
work, shifting the emphasis away from the intentionality of beliefs and
judgings towards the intentionality of perception and emotions. Dennett’s
way of embodying intentionality does not challenge these intellectualist
presuppositions.
Merleau-Ponty’s project remains in a strict sense philosophical, even
though he uses many examples from the psychological and physiological
 PRE-REFLECTIVE INTENTIONALITY 85

sciences. He is looking for a general structure of intentionality that lies

behind specific empirical findings. Dennett’s orientation is different: His
aim is to provide an account of intentionality which is compatible with and
belongs to the same realm as scientific explanations. Dennett represents an
attempt to naturalize philosophy, while Merleau-Ponty, according to my
interpretation, continues the anti-naturalist strain in Husserl’s thinking.

NOTES

∗ I am grateful to the members of the NOS-H Intentionality Project and Martin C. Dillon
for valuable comments on earlier versions of this article, and to Nordiska Samarbetsnämn-
den för Humanistisk Forskning (NOS-H) for financing my research during the years 1995–
1997.
1 By emphasizing that the direction and aboutness of intentional acts are metaphorical
descriptions, I do, of course, not imply that these descriptions are “mere metaphors”. It
is acknowledged and in several contexts argued that metaphors may have unreducable
theoretical significance for our understanding of phenomena as well as concepts. See e.g.,
Black (1962, 1979) and Lloyd (1993).
2 Husserl makes the distinction between the intentionality of act and operative intention-
ality in his Formal and Transcendental Logic, which, according to John Drummond, is the
most important of Husserl’s later works for an understanding of his view on the structure
of intentional acts (Drummond 1990, 176).
3 Merleau-Ponty connects the importance of this distinction to some comments on Kant
and indicates that intentionality of act is the only type of intentionality present in Kant’s
work.
4 Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of space is a descendant of Kant’s conception, but he
departs from the Kantian view in some important respects. As Dillon puts it, “[o]pposing
himself to the assumption of the primordiality of objective space, Merleau-Ponty argues in
favor of the primacy of lived space” (Dillon 1988, 135). According to Kant, our experience
of space is in necessary conformity to Euclidean geometry and therefore a priori. From
this it follows, that the senses are a priori united and experience the same single space.
Merleau-Ponty, as Husserl in Crisis, criticizes the objectivist claim that the experience of
Euclidian geometry is necessary, and from this it follows that he does not regard the unity
of the senses as an a priori truth (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 221). Instead, he regards the
diversity of the senses and the fact that we are in the world as necessary in this world,
and therefore a priori, while the unity of the senses is something we conclude by moving
in space. Merleau-Ponty criticizes the sharp Kantian distinction between a priori and a
posteriori; necessity is not a criterion for the a priori, which may be contingent. Things
discovered a posteriori, as the unity of the senses, may become a priori in the sense that we,
living in this world, always have access to one world. But this a priori remain contingent
(cf. Hammond et al. 1991, 266–267).
5 This can also be expressed so that the intentional arc projects space, future et al. round
about the subject (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 136).
6 The role of the intentional arc is difficult to understand also in relation to Merleau-
Ponty’s claim that the senses are not a priori united. The intentional arc, with its unity of
the senses, can not be understood as a priori; the human experience of moving around in
86 MARTINA REUTER

a given world is prior to this unity. The intentional arc should probably be understood in
accordance with Merleau-Ponty’s loosening of the a priori – a posteriori distinction, as an
a posteriori abstraction, which becomes a priori.
7 I follow an interpretation of Husserl’s notion of noema, argued by John Drummond,
according to which the noema is a technical term by which Husserl refers to the intentional
object, i.e., the intended object as intended, e.g., the perceived as perceived (Drummond
1990, 57).
8 Merleau-Ponty’s notion of representation is mainly adopted from the psychological and
neurophysiological texts he uses. He discusses mental representations e.g., in connection
to a case of apraxia, which is a disorder of voluntary movement, leading to a more or
less total inability to perform purposeful movements, in spite of intact muscular power and
conscious understanding of what the request means (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 126, 138–
139). Explanations of apraxia, utilizing the concept of representation to express awareness
of movement, are forced either to claim that the patient posits a representation, but lacks
physiological ability to move his limb, in which case the limb is paralyzed, or to claim that
the physical ability is present, but the representation is lacking and movement therefore
impossible. In this case apraxia is a form of agnosia; the patient has forgotten the repre-
sentation. Neither of these explanations capture what is specific for apraxia, according to
Merleau-Ponty. He states that, “[a]s long as consciousness is understood as representation,
the only possible operation for it is to form representations” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 139).
This statement reflects Husserl’s conclusion about mental representations leading to an
endless regress.
9 Husserl’s criticism of explanations using the notion of representations is one reason why
he does not speak about ‘intentional objects’, which implies some kind of second-order
objects, but prefers the concept of noema (cf. Husserl 1913/62, 242).
10 Merleau-Ponty’s description of a pre-reflective intentional act resembles Descartes’
description of the passion wonder (admiration). In his Passions of the Soul Descartes
regards wonder as the first of all the passions, it is experienced before we may make
any judgements about the nature of the object, while other passions are evaluations of
objects as beneficial or harmful (Descartes 1649/1985, 350). Cartesian wonder as well
as the pre-reflective love described by Merleau-Ponty is a non-evaluative, but directed
attention towards something. For an illuminating comparison of Descartes’ wonder and
a phenomenological attitude, see Heinämaa (1999).
11 This interpretation is, of course, strongly backed up by many of Husserl’s own writings
(e.g., Husserl 1913/62, 223, 233), as well as by Brentano’s original statement, where he
defined mental phenomena as “those phenomena which contain an object intentionally
within themselves” (Brentano 1874/1973, 89). But, it is perhaps not the only possible
interpretation of Husserl.
12 By this I do not mean that Merleau-Ponty’s philosophical inferences does not have radi-
cal implications for Husserl’s phenomenology. Merleau-Ponty is much more explicit in his
criticism of Husserl as well as Sartre in his late uncompleted work The Visible and the In-
visible, and I quite agree with M.C. Dillon that Merleau-Ponty’s late, explicitly ontological
conclusions follow from his earlier phenomenology of perception (Dillon 1988).
13 Husserl introduces the term noetic phase, or noesis, because such terms as ‘phases of
consciousness’, ‘awareness’ and even ‘intentional phases’ have become unusable through
equivocations introduced mainly by naturalistic psychology. Husserl states that “noeses
constitute the specifications of ‘Nous’ (mind, spirit) in the widest sense of the term, which
in all the actual forms of life which belong to it brings us back to cogitationes, and then to
 PRE-REFLECTIVE INTENTIONALITY 87

intentional experiences generally, and therewith includes all that (and essentially only that)
which is the eidetic presuppostition of the idea of a Norm” (Husserl 1913/62, 228–229).
14 As experiencing subjects, we are not able to distinguish between the form and the hyletic
material of our intentional experiences, but Husserl suggests that the phenomenologist
should make this conceptual distinction in order to analyze experience (Haaparanta 1996,
4).
15 In Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty writes of “the symbolical ‘pregnancy’
of form in content” (Merleau-Ponty 1945/62, 291; cf. Dillon 1988, 67), referring to Ernst
Cassirer’s Philosophie der symbolischen Formen. Merleau-Ponty does not draw any onto-
logical conclusions from this ‘matter-pregnant-with-form’ before his late The Visible and
the Invisible, but there are good grounds to think that the foundation for this ontology was
made when he introduced his notion of the phenomenon in Phenomenology of Perception
(cf. Dillon 1988, 46, 52–55).
16 Merleau-Ponty outlines his criticism of naturalistic conclusions of Gestalt psychology
mainly in his early The Structure of Behavior, and later refers to this criticism (Merleau-
Ponty 1945/62, n50–55, n59; cf. Dillon 1988, 68–70).
17 It is interesting – but outside the scope of this paper – to compare Gurwitsch’s example
with John Searle’s well known argument about the so-called Chinese room. Searle (1984,
32–36) attempts to show that computers do not think by showing that the ability – of a
computer or person – to manipulate Chinese symbols does not in itself lead to an ability to
understand Chinese. A person locked into a room may with the help of a technical manual
learn to combine Chinese letters in a manner that gives the impression of fluent Chinese,
and he or she may master the syntax of Chinese without learning to understand Chinese.
Searle’s argument rests on a strict distinction between syntax and semantics, between
form and content of language, and it shows that computers do not think in the sense of
mastering semantics by referring to the definition of a computer as a system manipulating
mere syntax. Gurwitsch’s example implies that there is no such strict distinction between
syntax and semantics.
18 Immanuel Levinas’ modification of the phenomenological notion of intentionality
resembles at this point Merleau-Ponty’s notion. According to Levinas, consciousness en-
counters the world as opaque. The world can never be fixed in a subject’s knowledge of
an unchanging essence. Levinas understands intentionality as the relationship with alterity
(Levinas 1961/69, 121–26; Davis 1996, 21).
19 Husserl is not universalizing in any naive sense. He, on the contrary, is explicitly aware
of cultural differences when he writes that, “when we are thrown into an alien social sphere,
that of the Negroes in the Congo, Chinese peasants, etc., we discover that their truths, the
facts that for them are fixed, generally verified or verifiable, are by no means the same as
ours” (1954/70, 139).
20 The definition of intentionality as the intentionality of beliefs has also been criticized
from inside Dennett’s own theoretical tradition. See e.g., Amélie Rorty (1988, 109-13).

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Department of Philosophy
P.O. Box 24
00014 University of Helsinki
Finland
e-mail: martina.reuter@helsinki.fi