Collective Intentionality as a Concept in Phenomenology (original) (raw)

We plan to go to for a walk together; we dance or cook together; we marry; our assessment committee believes that the candidate deserves promotion. These and countless other, rather ordinary, cases of intending, doing, or believing something together have been subsumed under such headings as "shared," "joint," "we-," or "collective intentionality" (henceforth: CI). But how can two or more individuals-literally, and not just figuratively speaking-collectively, or as a group, realize intentional states, whose sole proprietor traditionally was thought to be precisely and exclusively individual minds? Indeed, many today hold that we can not only genuinely share goals, intentions, actions, or beliefs but also such allegedly purely private mental states as memories or imaginations, as well as experiential and affective states of various kinds (emotions, moods, atmospheres, etc.). We can imagine together how nicely we could furnish our new apartment, enjoy watching a movie together, or be angry at our government's failing to meet climate change goals, and may even share a nostalgic mood or be enwrapped by a pervasive atmosphere of shared anxiety (Osler and Szanto 2021). Over the past three decades, an ever-increasing roster of work in analytic philosophy and social ontology has tried to account for the alleged puzzle of CI (see Schweikard and Schmid 2013; Jankovic and Ludwig 2018). More recently, a growing number of scholars have mined early and classical phenomenology, demonstrating that there are ingenious proposals of CI developed by Husserl, Scheler, Heidegger, Stein, Schmalenbach, Walther, Otaka, Hildebrand, Gurwitsch, Stavenhagen, and Sartre. 1 Indeed, it is safe to say that phenomenologists were the first to have systematically discussed not just intersubjectivity but also collective intentionality avant la lettre. But however it stands with historical uniqueness, phenomenological contributions are among the most sophisticated in spelling out the experiential, affective, but also normative dimensions of CI. And it is certainly no coincidence that those phenomenologists who have most 1