The overview above promotes understanding of much more complex actual wholes of thought, affect and behaviour and other complex connections (IV, 135, 224–225, 237, IX, XVII, 232, 234). This section makes comments on more complex combinations of sense and intentionality: Another place where “meta-cognition” , the awareness of awareness, appears is in relation to intentional links between noeses and between objects. The being of consciousness as revealed through phenomenological methods is seen as wholistic, all-inclusive and holographic. Let’s spell this out. The unusual being of consciousness is co-extensive with meaning, others, contexts, time and history. Consciousness is the depositary for human understanding that is achieved through intentionality. Meaning and consciousness are co-extensive: consciousness has no outside in the sense that everything that is understood is inside consciousness (I, 33, 117, III, 93 VI, 169, fn, IX, 344, XIX/1, 425, XXV, 29). What appears of the outside of consciousness (its understandings) are still on the inside of consciousness (II, 7–14). Similarly, all evidence, theoretical and rational argument, justifications of transcendent being and conclusions concerning the being of consciousness or any object are on the inside of consciousness. This is why consciousness is an important topic worthy of study.

The everyday life of the natural attitude is comprised of a whole where specific cultural objects have senses that are apparent to individuals and cultural groups. One case that has been mentioned is multiple occurrences: there are nested types of intentionality that relate to recognisable senses of an object across many different givennesses of it (IV, 225). Something that could be called the recognisability of identity or pattern-matching when the focus is on an object in its context. Intentional implication is called pairing or association (XI, 5), and forms a bridge or link (XI, 123) between what appears sensually because it motivates, conditions or adds sense. The point is that once two meanings get put together then they both combine into a recognisable pattern which grasps the learning between the two previously separate objects (III, 245, 247). Linked connections together then constitute manifold noetic-noematic senses of the same object. For instance, in conjunction with temporality , there are the many facets of the experience of time: past, present, unassigned and future. There is also a link between the basic ability to be aware of one’s own awareness. Appresentation includes the automatic reawakening of the past learnings involved, when self has previously understood any perceptual object (I, 112–113). Appresentation is comprised of the intentionalities that constitute the senses of self that get added to perception (XVII, 362–366) such as additions between oneself as a körper for others and as leib to oneself thus producing a sense of oneself as leibkörper (I, 141, 143).

There is a whole between one consciousness and between all consciousnesses. Constituting egoic intentionalities and non-egoic syntheses implicate others in associations of sense (I, 118–119, IV, 142–143). Consciousness assimilates senses of the ‘outside’ transcendent objects ‘into’ itself. And once such senses are inside, all the moments are in potential contact with each other. The senses of one object implicate further senses of that object and associate it with other objects altogether, the senses that are already learned or known. Intentional implication is another way of expressing the links between the many parts of consciousness that get stored and created, and is a return to the primary phenomenon (III, 49–50, IV, 226). Yet includes the idea of association where just one type of it is between perception, its retention and remembering (XI, 284). Hyletic presences , associated memories, motivations and other experiences are linked together in complex ways (III, 181, fn). Intentional givenness can be modified. For instance, memory is a modified form of what may have appeared perceptually or in imagination perhaps. For instance, what was a present experience becomes modified in retentional consciousness when it is replayed. But what is re-presented in memory , is re-playing in a new present moment is an intentional modification of the previous now. This form of connection between experiences and meanings is the “intentional modification” of the forms of givenness, (such as remembering, anticipating, empathising, imagining) that are different to the clarity of their here and now first occurrence (III, 215). The theory of intentional implication is a way of understanding how forms of givenness interrelate (III, 208–213, XXIII, 307–312, 335, 343). Both implications and modifications comprise the structure of the intentionality of consciousness. There are temporal examples but there are many other ways in which one type of givenness can get modified into another. The inner parts of consciousness and retentional consciousness are linked as parts and wholes. For instance, on being told a story by another person, what was original was their voice that delivered the concepts expressed. But the concepts evoke visual images in the listener and emotions in the total felt-experience of listening. For instance, the point of a story is not just the sum total of the conceptual meanings received. It also elicits an emotional impact and expresses values.

However, the big picture of consciousness is consciousness in its intersubjective life with others. When focusing on solo conscious what appears after the transcendental reduction is the primordial world (I, 129, IX, 58). The lifeworld is comprised of non-egoic passive processes in addition to the egoic ones before 1936 approximately. Empathy acts to co-constitute the intersubjective world of meanings and practices associated with various objects. What this means is that actual everyday living, thinking and feeling are the ground for meaning and theory-building concerning how meaning and its motivations exist. What Fig. 7.1 expresses is the referent set of experiences and meanings that are inevitably the root of the matter when it comes to any form of psychology. Even natural psychological science is still about people in general, even when it doesn’t make precise reference to the psychological meaning and their givennesses for it can only ever be the case that meaning is according to the perspective of someone, the participant or the researcher. Finally, what the fourfold picture of the being of consciousness shows is that there is always a world-whole. Whatever the specific style of being in a world, there is an attunement to others. Being intersubjective is simultaneously a connection to others and a positioning of self with them, even if no one is present currently. Simultaneously with present or absent others, there is a positioning in time where the being of any noesis-noema correlation about an object is existent as memory , or perception, or anticipated, or any other number of types of givenness, plus the doxic sense of the modality of its being. Phenomenology captures and makes explicit the subtle qualities and nuances of how cultural objects are believed to exist. This is Husserl’s boon to philosophy, psychology and academia. The following sections all define conclusions about consciousness in general.

Let’s go into more detail about the being of consciousness because what has been stated so far was introductory. The watchword for understanding human experience is intentionality : The quality of being aware of specific objects in specific ways. The many objects of attention include conceptual objects, cultural objects that belong to a group or cultural world , values and ideal objects that are unchanging across time and many more besides. Some of these objects are fulfilled or present and some are empty in that they have no sensual givenness. Husserl classified meanings according to the apperceptive characters (III, 265, 258) of noesis-noema correlates; and “hyle” , sensual givenness in the five senses, plus the hyletic-sensual givenness of the visual imagining, anticipation and memory (III, 171–173) which are open to the intentional analysis of these fields of object-awareness (XI, 145–148). Figure 7.2 brings together the family of intentionality between noesis and noema .

In an extended format, Fig. 7.2 formulates the relationships between some of the most pertinent genus and species of intentionality, for one consciousness in abstraction from others. What is happening in the larger sphere is that belief and temporality are at work in bringing together and holding apart these pieces that comprise the apparently seamless whole of taken-for-granted experience that the majority of people experience. It is only when reflection begins does it become understood how the pieces fit together in their definitive ways. For instance, in remembering the “identity of x, which I remember, is given to me only because I do not refer to x solely from one perspective… when remembering, I refer to x, the (i.e. the same x) that I had perceived in the past”, (Marbach 1987, 253). The recognition of identity is a similar act whereby what is retained implicitly, in the storehouse of retained past experiences, is still potentially present when a contemporary example is met in perception. When a T is found perceptually, it is recognised as a T automatically because of the earliest or earlier experience of it following the example of a child learning what scissors are (I, 141). Despite the earliest memory of T not being available to consciousness, it is nevertheless the marker by which the here and now T is given meaning. The identity is recognised with respect to the previous learnings of what a T looks like, which could be called pattern-matching . It can also be the case that perception and other forms of awareness need retentional consciousness to confirm the identity of what appears here and now (Marbach 1993, 44, 109). Similarly, there is the evidence of what is felt, be it emotionally or bodily, what love and hate feel like, or anything else that is describable and commonly understood as mental, experiential and recognisable by others.

Consciousness is a temporal whole in that it is caught between the past, the present and the future. In fact there are complex ways in which these types of experiences are encoded and replayed, while (usually) keeping aware of their different types and not confusing one for another. The temporal being of consciousness called retentional consciousness is such that it features a form of automatic memory that records every experience. The evidence of the different givenness of temporal experience is easier to spot with memory and anticipation . The interpretation of the original temporal field is constructed though. The best evidence for protention is surprise and disappointment experiences, where an immediate protention is exceeded or thwarted by reality. Similarly, retentional consciousness is shown in the lingering sense of the immediately past in any experience. Temporality reveals the ability of consciousness to be aware of itself automatically across time, in such a way that processes and objects are united as a whole (cf Kant’s schemata 1787, B179–182) and the observable phenomena is that consciousness unites itself across time (1787, B131–132, cf III, 242). Consciousness is temporal in a number of ways in addition to its holding onto its past through automatic involuntary processes. But consciousness forgets and confabulates too. Consciousness re-presents what it knows via explicit memory . But also habit, belief and anticipation show what retentional memory and anticipation bring to the present moment. Temporality has a role in that it is a fundamental conceptual structure to separate the timeframes now, present and future. Assumptions about future possibility show how understanding of the individual map of the world that each person holds in their automatic memory , their learning about the world, is thrown forwards so it can be checked against what actually happens. The simple forms of intentionality are related to the overall complex experience of existing in time: There is a temporal orientation that pervades experiential evidence. For instance, remembering is about what a visual perceiving was. Or remembering what was said by another, what was felt and what was thought by self (Marbach 1993, 79). Anticipating is the opposite of remembering as it concerns what will be seen, what will be said and, for instance, how self will feel yet it never has a real referent. There can be further complications because intentionalities can be in relation to an anticipatory empathising of how someone might act. For instance, entering into the present moment with inaccurate understanding can create the disappointment of expectations. Empathising the other accurately and discussing the impression gained of them with them, shows the presence of accurate anticipations that are confirmed (while inaccurate anticipations are disappointed). Comparisons between what is expected and what actually happens can be motivation for emotion and mood. For instance, if anticipations are focussed elsewhere and something pleasant happens, the comparison between the two objects produces surprise and happiness. Similarly, if anticipations are high but are not met in actuality then disappointment occurs.

What appears in the context of perception , here and now, has superimposed within it all forms of meaning that have different temporal characteristics. There are the passing and changing objects of the straight-forward attention. For instance, text makes sense because it is an encoded visual and linguistic representation of the authorial writing voice. Plus—there is a future orientation. There is more to say and text expresses the story that unfolds. Plus—there is a past orientation because the previous words of the story are still held in consciousness. Retentional consciousness holds on to what the reader has captured so far. In the same way that the previous bars of a song are still fresh when listening to music, a tune appears across time (Ferrara 1984; Smith 1989). All these are facets of the work that consciousness does in making sense in a linear fashion. Perceptual objects are found in vision, audition, taste, smell and bodily felt-sense such as touch, vibration, pain or the position of the musculo-skeletal joints or other physical sensations (IV, 151, 212–213). Perception can be expressed according to the formula of “perception provides a (perceptual noematic sense) that →, leads to, the identification [of a perceptual object that is not contextualised in the natural or naturalistic contexts of understanding]”. Or in a more longhand form a “visual noesis gives a visual noema about an object understood in its identity”. In this case, the noema is the understood or meant sense, as-it-is-experienced to exist now. It appears in the everyday world and gets interpreted to show its manner of being experienced and is the result of a developmental history of accruing changing senses (XI, 345). The case of “SB”, real name Sydney Bradford, is a case of a man who was blind since birth, but when aged 52 he had corneas removed, but was then unable to understand a great deal of what he saw (Gregory 1998). He could recognise some objects and because he had felt them when he was blind, he liked to use touch to support what he saw when he became sighted. But novel objects such as buildings, long distances, reflections in mirrors and the Necker cube illusion were unknown to him. This example can be used to support the naturalistic interpretation that his brain did not have the neuronal connections to support the learning . But intentionally, the sense fields of touch and vision were disconnected for him and needed to be picked up through careful exposure to them, which is something that did not happen for him.

Eduard Marbach concludes that perceiving in the five senses presents the awareness of real objects and events in the here and now, including how one’s own body feels, in addition to being the on-going context for the experiencing of all other types of sense (Marbach 1993, 51–52). Perception includes vision, audition and the kinaesthesia of how one’s own body feels (sometimes called the proprioception of one’s own bodily sensations). There are four types of bodily sensation : Movement, temperature, physical sensitivity and the position of the muscular-skeletal joints (IV, 144–151, VI, 108–110). Each contributing perceptual system has its own way of perceiving self, others and the world. Metaphorically speaking, perception is sticky in that it has past meaning added to it. Perception is open in that many different types of sense get connected to the here and now surrounding context. The instant is open temporally to the past, the future and the free imagination, and a host of other possibilities. For a description of vision to refer correctly, one easy way to get started is to see something or be using memory or imagination to inspect a recent vivid and clear example. Looking at a visual object and noting the set of distinctions that can be observed by oneself is a genuine type of evidence that is freely available in the laboratory that is everyday living.

Perception needs to be sharply distinguished from all else that appears in the now (Bernet et al. 1993, 116–125; Bernet 1979). Another word that is used to describe the givenness of what appears is “representation”. Vision represents objects of attention as visually real in the here and now. Generally, what is perceived is presumed to be existent in contradistinction to the cases of hallucination, memory and imagining that override perception if the givenness of these experiences is very strong or they can merely co-occur with perception in lesser strength. Perception is the most basic consciousness . However, all intentionalities represent their objects in their own characteristic manner. Bodiliness in the sense of the direct experience of one’s own physiology is directly connected to the emotional self, leiblichkeit, is also classed as a form of perception. The body in visual perception makes empathy occur which, in 1912, is referred to as somatology, a phenomenology of the body in the sense of studying those semiotic aspects through which nonverbal communication and leiblichkeit make sense. The expressive body has a mode of public givenness now called nonverbal communication (IV, 131, 140, 234–235, 240, 244, 245, 247, 268, 272, 320, 375, 377, V, 8–9, VI, 476–481). Consciousness permeates the body: “Body and soul thus signify two real strata in this experiential world which are integrally and really connected similarly to, and in the same sense as, two pieces of a body”, (VI, 219). In addition to what has already been said about bodiliness above, leiblichkeit is a complex form of intentionality for a number of reasons, and is not just plain bodily sensation without a context or history . Consciousness is embodied in a number of different senses. Primarily consciousness is extended into the lived space of the ‘personal’ body-sensation that appears to the ego where emotion and moods come and go. But also the body looks out on itself visually as it walks, empathises, remembers, listens, sleeps, eats, is depressed… In another sense, the physical body makes consciousness a part of the physical world because it is the container and intermediary for connections between self, others and cultural objects. Bodiliness, of voluntary and involuntary forms, is a special category of being that could be called interbodiliness, a sense that was well expressed by Merleau-Ponty: “Henceforth, as the parts of my body together comprise a system, so my body and the other’s are one whole, two sides of one and the same phenomenon, and the anonymous existence of which my body is the ever-renewed trace henceforth inhabits both bodies simultaneously. All of which makes another living being, but not yet another man”, in the sense that the meaning of the other is forever a transcendence in immanence (Merleau-Ponty 1962, 354). Another dimension of consciousness is the connection between the ego and the passive self, the difference between the ego, as I can, an ability to physically move and act in a sustained and skilled manner in the world—as opposed to the habitual and automatic aspects of self as anonymous passivity , a motivated and automatic set of connections with other people in relation to one’s own syntheses of felt-bodiliness and temporality . The history of the smile in art, dentistry and nonverbal communication can be interpreted as a set of social meanings of showing affection or withholding it (Trumble 2004). More details about nonverbal communication are provided in chapter 9.

Behaviour is most often the purposeful action of the will towards a desired outcome, one that is not currently existent but one that lies in the future (III, 242, XXXVIII, 106, 230–232, cited in Nenon 1990). Behaviour, or action of any sort, is classed as a mental act and can be the result of both emotional and rational consideration. Tom Nenon comments that: “Where the will exists, the action consistent with it will follow; modus tollens tells us that we can therefore also read back directly from the action to the will. Where the action is missing (but was possible) there can have been no such will”, (1990, 304–305). Behaviour can vary in its degree of skilfulness. Skilled behaviour improves with practice and sometimes may need on-going practice to maintain good performance. Some forms of behaviour are very conscious and deliberate whilst others are automatic. And there can be mixtures of deliberate and involuntary skill such as playing tennis or speaking. In therapy, the contemporary understanding of changing behaviour sees it as a basic and complex nonverbal change (Longmore and Worell 2007). Changes in practical intentionality are highly likely to change mood and emotion , and that has potentially immediately positive effects for the self-esteem. Behaviour is most often purposeful action towards a desired outcome where understanding guides action (XI, 62). It is a form of intentionality (XXXVIII, 103–106, 107–111, Pfänder 1967). Behaviour is classed as a mental act and can be the result of both emotion and rational consideration. It is permissable to study the behaviour of an individual (IV, 189–190).