Intentionality

In talking to two friends about my presentation in Vienna, and that idea, briefly mentioned yesterday, of subsong as a way of weaving the world into being and weaving oneself into the world, the term "intentionality" came up. In philosophy, this isn't about intending to do something, like having a plan, but about the directedness of or perhaps the contents of a mental state. So, when you hear, you hear something; when you see, you see something; and when you are conscious or aware you are conscious of or aware of something. In the robin discussion, we were saying that Bobbit was conscious of me. His gaze was intentional, in that he gazed at me. We shared moments of mutual intentionality.

So let's say I had knowledge of Bobbit subsinging; he had knowledge of me responding. Knowledge. Now read this, with this idea in mind - except instead of thinking of human consciousness, just replace that with any living being's consciousness.

Goethe… saw the knowledge of a phenomenon as being intimately related to the phenomenon itself, because for him the state of “being known” was to be understood as a further stage of the phenomenon itself. It is the stage which the phenomenon reaches in human consciousness. Consequently the knower is not an onlooker but a participant in nature's processes, which now act in consciousness to produce the phenomenon consciously as they act externally to produce it materially. This is the meaning of Goethe's remark that the aim of science should be that “through the contemplation of an ever creating nature, we should make ourselves worthy of spiritual participation in her productions.” If “being known” is a higher stage of the phenomenon itself, then the phenomenon should not be imagined as being complete until it is known. The participatory view of the role of consciousness in knowledge is therefore an evolutionary view, in the widest sense, because the state of “being known” is an evolutionary development of nature itself. When consciousness is properly prepared, it becomes the medium in which the phenomenon itself comes into presence. We call this “knowing the phenomenon,” and understand it subjectively. But in a more comprehensive view it is the phenomenon itself which appears in consciousness when it is known. This is the ontological significance of intuitive knowledge. The true significance of “theory” now becomes apparent. When the phenomenon becomes its own theory, this is a higher stage of the phenomenon itself. Evidently this does not apply to the kind of theory which is an intellectual framework imposed on the phenomenon by the mind. Thus the phenomenologist of nature himself becomes the apparatus in which the phenomenon actualizes as a higher stage of itself. This brings us to a more comprehensive form of the principle of the wholeness of the apparatus and the phenomenon being investigated (see note 49). In this case the scientist himself becomes the apparatus in which the phenomenon appears. Hence, for the intuitive knowledge of nature, when the phenomenon becomes its own theory, we have the ontological condition that the knower and the known constitute an indivisible whole. -The Wholeness of Nature, Henri Bortoft

I really think this aligns with what I said about subsong. As a reminder, here's part of the text of my paper:

When we empathise with one who empathises with us, as I suggest happened with Bobbit and me, we transform each other’s psyche. What I mean is that what I apprehended of Bobbit, his affects, level of excitation and so on, impacted me– as mine did him, and then we each shared again these modifications, until we were exchanging feelings diffracted (Barad 2007) through and with each other’s state of mind. What is important here is that one accepts simultaneously both the alterity of the other (“differences matter” (Barad 2007)) and also that one can be immersed in and immerse the other; one has to “overcome the idea of composition and fusion. Between the elements of the same world there is a complicity and an intimacy that go much deeper than those produced by physical contiguity; what is more, this attachment is not identical with an amalgam.... If things form a world, it is because they mix without losing their identity” (Coccia 2019, 51). Freya Mathews writes of a similar experience, which she terms “synergy”:

[I]t is conducive to a very immediate experience of intersubjectivity. In synergistic interactions, the impulse creatively to express myself is shaped… by your equivalent impulse. I find new possibilities of self-expression, possibilities I could never have found on my own, in creative co-action with you. These new forms of self- expression, spontaneously arising in me in response to you, are more uniquely mine than any soliloquy could have been; yet they are at the same time both mine and yours. (2008, 10)

And I wonder, was I part of, collaborating with, and co-creating Bobbit’s subsong, which was still more uniquely his own than any soliloquy could have been? I return to the concept of Stimmung, which is often translated as “attunement”, and certainly I experienced a mutual attunement in these moments. Yet I am also struck by the word’s etymology: “Stimmung derives from the root Stimme, which means voice. “Despite this original reference to the human body and expression, the abstract noun Stimmung was first used with reference to musical instruments” (Thonhauser 2021). As music, song, can both capture mood or atmosphere, and create mood and atmosphere, so Bobbit’s song captured and created territory while his subsong captured and created the Stimmung between us. Indeed, treading further into the liminal realm, I suggest that during periods of sustained and intimate mutual attunement, the bird and his whispered song also captured and created me. Bobbit sang my fragmented self into a state of harmony. In becoming song and being sung into the world, I was, like the territory, drawn by the bird into a process of oikeiōsis, “a homecoming into selfhood which is never completed, and which is a dynamic, material-evaluative interaction between interiority and exteriority” (Kruger 2024, 76). It was not a case of the mutual attunement creating a static or boundaried identity, rather the bird’s subsong drew me into encounter with the world as he was weaving it into song. We were in a metaphysical space in which song, becoming, and selves mixed with the world and were in turn affected by mixture, such that the world exists within (Coccia 2019, 108).