What is a subject without an object? This is a question that has recurred throughout the history of philosophy, but one that really hit home for Edmund Husserl and the early phenomenological movement. One of the key recognitions of this movement was that consciousness is always consciousness of something. This is one of the key implications of the concept of intentionality. There is no free-floating consciousness that has no object. Phenomenology, as a form of philosophy, is a return to lived consciousness, to experience, as the starting point of philosophy. Necessarily, it is not possible for one to know or encounter a thing that cannot be given in experience, broadly construed. One must not make the mistake of equating experience with sensation, however, as a phenomenological understanding of experience is much wider than the realm of the five senses. Mental experience (thoughts, imaginations, etc.) and intuition of essences (the necessary form of beings considered apart from existence) would be included. The point of phenomenology, then, seems to be that philosophy is not something done outside of life in some hyper-intellectualized flight from the lived-world. The lived-world is the basis for philosophy, and all are enabled to philosophize by their thrown-ness in experience and their ability to be true to their own self-givenness.
I will expand more on this topic in the days to come...with a critique of strict subject-object intentionality (with a touch of things-in-themselves) being next.
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