Introduction

In this chapter I return to Husserl’s notion of intention, which I briefly introduced in Chapter 2 (§2.4), and combine it with his notion of “modification” to describe the role that directing novices’ attention plays in socialization. I also use Husserl’s conceptual apparatus to hypothesize that, even though children and novices have ways to modify their habitual way of being and the ability to assume what Husserl called a “theoretical attitude,” the accumulation of earlier intentional and phenomenal modifications into a well-established habitus might prevent certain changes and thus certain types of learning from occurring.

Husserl’s intentionality and the relationship with the modification of attention

For Husserl, intentionality covers a wide range of acts that go from transforming raw sensations into a meaningful entity (e.g., a sequence of sounds into a song) to combining several such experiences into more complex meanings (e.g., the remembering of the time when we heard that song for the first time). An important element of Husserl’s phenomenology is the key role of attention.

By bringing some objects to the foreground while leaving others in the background, attention is one of the ways in which the temporality of our being-in-the-world gets realized (Arvidson 2003, 2006; Depraz 2004; Husserl 2004). To better capture the different ways in which the phenomenal world changes for the perceiving, thinking, acting, and interacting Subject, Husserl at times used the notion of “modification” (German Modifikation) – a term that bears a family resemblance with other terms also used by Husserl, including Wandlung, Abwandlung, and Änderung – combined with a number of adjectives that express different experiences as well as different theoretical points of view.