Brentano's Intentionality

For Brentano, intentionality is the exclusive to the realm of the mental. This means that for any mental phenomena to occur, it must be directed toward some object, either mental or physical. For instance, if I recall a mental phenomena of sadness this morning, I can point to the mental phenomena of say, my parents as the object my mental phenomena of sadness was direct toward. In this, Brentano isn’t necessarily seeking to establish a substance dualism between the mental and the physical, but to demarcate the realm of the mental to build a ground upon which an empirical psychology can build.
However, his concept of intentionality raises a question: for any mental phenomena to be direct toward an object, does that require the mind to be presently conscious of the object? Suppose I have a general, pervasive feeling of anxiety, and I can’t pin down any specific trigger or mental or physical phenomena that my feeling of anxiety is directed toward. Does intentionality still work in this scenario? Hereafter, I will clarify Brentano’s theory in discussing that one does not necessarily need to be conscious of an object that a mental phenomena is directed toward in order for it to be a content of a mental phenomenon. I will also speculate on the possibility of how anxiety can be viewed under the frame of intentionality.

The key distinction for Brentano is between inner observation and inner perception. Inner observation requires adding on an additional mental act of observation directed toward the mental phenomena being observed, which has its own content. According to Brentano, we can never directly observe the object of inner perception as it is occurring. Inner perception, on the other hand, isn’t entirely another mental phenomena separate from the initial, but is part of the mental act itself. The mental act is primarily directed toward a mental or physical phenomena as its object, and secondarily directed toward itself. For instance, in the seeing of a car, the physical phenomena of “car” is the primary object of my perception, and my awareness of my seeing is the secondary object, I am aware of the medium of my perception. Yet sometimes the primary content of the mental phenomena is so great that it overshadows the presence of the secondary.

Under this view, we can become conscious of the objects of our mental acts, but not as they presently occur. We must rely on “memory and inner observation” after the act, whether posthaste just after a moment, or much longer after. Therefore, there is always an object of our mental acts for Brentano, independent of whether or not we direct our attention to those mental acts occurring.

In pondering on how a feeling of generalized anxiety could be explained under Brentano’s view of intentionality, I concluded that it could be that a general feeling of anxiety could be a mental act directed toward several objects, gradually compounded phenomenon that might amplify that feeling of anxiety, making it much more difficult to observe the object(s) that are the content of such mental phenomena. It is not without serious and attentive introspection after the fact, or some strong training in the ability to coax and calm oneself out of an anxious state while in the midst of it, that one can begin pinpointing the object(s) of one’s anxiety.