Sāṃkhya Concept of Intentional Consciousness
摘要
The paper titled “Sāṃkhya Concept of Intentional Consciousness” intends to discuss the concept of consciousness as presented in the philosophy of Sāṃkhya. It commits to investigate a specific dimension of consciousness, namely, the intentionality of consciousness. The concept of the intentionality of consciousness is primarily a Western philosophical concept which began its journey from Aristotle followed by an array of philosophers including Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl and many others in the phenomenological and existentialistic tradition of contemporary Western philosophy. The paper takes up the Husserlian model of intentionality as an ideal structure of consciousness and proposes to investigate whether the age-old Sāṃkhya philosophy also claims to exhibit such an intentional structure of consciousness. It is finally submitted that Sāṃkhya is concerned with the intentionality of consciousness up to a certain extent; but then, it transcends the boundary of intentionality in order to explain the real nature of consciousness and attempts to propound an unparallel and unique concept of consciousness ever unfounded in the Western philosophical tradition, namely, the pure non-intentional consciousness, which has been identified with the pure self, the Puruṣa.