Abstract
How can the inner structure of we-intentionality be described? The early phenomenological account of Gerda Walther (Zur Ontologie der sozialen Gemeinschaft. In: Jahrbuch für Philosophie und phänomenologische Forschung, vol 6. Niemeyer, Halle, pp 1–158, 1923) offers interesting insights into the nature of human sociality: according to her we-intentionality is embedded in a network of intentional habits a network that shapes individual minds. She claims that the core of community is grounded in a concrete, intentional background that arises through a particular structure of affective intentionality: habitual joining.
In Walther’s approach, the core of the We is pre-reflexive and non-thematic and it is formed in habits through a web of conscious and unconscious sentiments of joining. This us-background, a non-reducible basic level of community, is a necessary condition for actual we-intentionality. Common intentionality can therefore neither be understood as involving a unique super-individual bearer, nor simply as a habit shared by multiple individuals—it is a web of intentional relations between individuals with which several habits are linked.
In Walther’s work we find no monological conception of intentionality, but a relational, interpersonal account of mind. A fresh look at her account could free the current debate from old prejudices concerning the phenomenological concept of intentionality. There is no preconstituted subjectivity that joins the community: in habitual joining, subjects and community reciprocally form each other.
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Notes
- 1.
In 1923, she also released an enquiry on mystics and additionally she published on psychiatry and parapsychology, being progressively ostracized by the scientific community because of her disconcerting interest in occultism (Lopez McAllister 1995).
- 2.
“[M]eine Erlebnisse vollziehen sich aktuell in meinem Ichzentrum, sie strömen ihm aus meinem Bewußtseinhintergrund, meinem Selbst, in das es eingebettet ist, zu. Doch in dieser Einbettung, in diesem Hintergrund, aus dem diese Erlebnisse hervorgehen, bin nicht nur ich allein als ‘ich selbst’—bei dem Gemeinschaftserlebnissen—, sondern ich habe die anderen ja mit in ihn hereingenommen, ich habe sie hinter meinem Ichzentrum in mein Selbst intentional aufgenommen (oder sie sind von selbst hineingewachsen) und ich fühle mich eins mit ihnen (unbewußt, automatisch oder auf Grund einer ausdrücklichen Einigung).”
- 3.
“Ich lebe und erlebe aus mir selbst und aus ihnen in mir zugleich heraus, aus ‘Uns’. Schon ehe diese Erlebnisse in den Ichpunkt eintreten, in ihm aktualisiert werden, sind sie also Gemeinschaftserlebnisse, denn sie entspringen ja schon als Regungen aus mir und den anderen in mir.”
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Caminada, E. (2014). Joining the Background: Habitual Sentiments Behind We-Intentionality. In: Konzelmann Ziv, A., Schmid, H. (eds) Institutions, Emotions, and Group Agents. Studies in the Philosophy of Sociality, vol 2. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6934-2_12
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