I would like to focus on an issue that usually does not receive a lot of attention from phenomenologists: the attitude of phenomenologists towards their work, their writing, and the descriptions they produce. Description presupposes an author who not only carries it out but who might perhaps know more than he merely describes. For example, in his Phenomenology Hegel introduces statements like “für uns aber” (but for us). Husserl speaks of the famous “unbeteiligter Zuschauer” (the impartial spectator), the spectator who is not implied. The whole mystery consists of understanding what this “excess of knowing” means, where it comes from.
If we apply these considerations to the notion of intentionality, consequences are especially dangerous. As is well known, the first and unavoidable fact for all phenomenology is that consciousness is directed towards the other thing. That is true to such a degree that Geworfenheit (facticity) has been raised to the level of a constitutive element of human existence. But the description of a consciousness that rests in the other thing, with the whole spectrum of variations, is not enough to characterize its “life”; it should be supplemented with the recovery of the extraverted intentionality towards itself, even if such a recovery cannot be exhaustive. This is the moment of self-awareness, where consciousness knows it has known and, because of this, becomes richer. It is the circuit existing at the center of all interiority. However, when considered this way, self-awareness does not only call into question intentionality but the whole project of phenomenology itself. E. Fink was the first to underline the problem: how is phenomenology able to elevate intentional analysis to the supreme range of knowledge without falling into a tremendous contradiction? Phenomenology speaks from the interior of an intentional analysis. It states that there is a subjective-objective pole and that there is a plurality of intentions that refers to a unity. But, does this not mean abandoning that very intentionality and judging it from a superior point of view while insisting at the same time that such superior viewpoint is impossible? One could argue the existence of a kind of second-order intentionality that overcomes the first and makes it conscious. This entails, however, claiming a phenomenology of phenomenology, and in such a case one would end up in an infinite regress. Here we are confronted with conceptual limits and, as all limits, these are paradoxical and deceiving for thought. Indeed, if we have some notion of a frontier that is limiting us, it is because somehow we have already overcome it. Similar aporia are unavoidable if we remain under the dominance of visual and spatial metaphors. The understanding of consciousness as something that “goes outside” and then “returns inside” (in spatial metaphors), and the perception of its limits of knowledge as a barrier separating what is known from what is unknown (in visual metaphors), is as provocative as wishing to think of a limited space beyond which there is nothing. It presupposes that consciousness is an “eye” that takes a look at a “landscape”.