Abstract
In this paper, I explore one particular dimension of Brentano’s legacy, namely, his theory of mental analysis. This theory has received much less attention in recent literature than the intentionality thesis or the theory of inner perception. However, I argue that it provides us with substantive resources in order to conceptualize the unity of intentionality and phenomenality. My proposal is to think of the connection between intentionality and phenomenality as a certain combination of part/whole relations rather than as a supervenience or identity relation. To begin, I discuss some reasons for being a (neo-)Brentanian about the mind and briefly introduce the main characteristics of Brentano’s internalist description program. Then, I turn to the current “inseparatist” way of dealing with intentionality and phenomenality, focusing on the demand for unity coming from advocates of phenomenal intentionality. I suggest that the unity of the mind may be put in a new light if we put aside metaphysical–epistemological questions, go back to Brentano’s description program, and endorse his thesis that the mental is something unified in which various parts must be distinguished. In the last section, I draw some lessons from this approach, holding that, for any representational content R, R is (in Brentano’s terms) an abstractive or “distinctional” part of the relevant state and that, for any qualitative aspect Q, Q is an abstractive or “distinctional” part of the relevant representational content R.
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Notes
See this paper, “Why go back to Brentano?”. One exception is Seron (2012), who compares Brentano’s concept of analysis to Carnap’s notion of “quasi-analysis.”
See Brentano (1874/2008), p. 125/107 [1995, p. 89]: “This intentional in-existence is characteristic exclusively of mental phenomena. No physical phenomenon exhibits anything like it,” as well as 137/115 [98]: “That feature which best characterizes mental phenomena is undoubtedly their intentional in-existence.”
On the difficulty to accommodate the publicity of intentional object from the Brentanian viewpoint, see Jacquette (2004), p. 103 and 107 ff.
Husserl himself occasionally refers to this analytical or mereological approach as being part of Brentano’s legacy. See, e.g., Husserl 1900–1901/1993, p. 436 [1970, p. 604].
Carl Stumpf (1848–1936) probably is the first member of the Brentano School that has developed an abstractive theory of “psychological parts” (see Stumpf 1873). As far as I know, he also introduced the central notion of “partial content” (Teilinhalt), which will be used by his pupil Hans Cornelius (1863–1947) and which certainly forms one important source of Husserl’s mereology in the third Logical Investigation.
The idea that describing is prior to explaining goes back at least to Brentano’s (1890–1891/1982) lectures on Descriptive Psychology. It has been propagated by the members of his school and by their followers. See Marty (1894–1895/2011, pp. 5–7; 1908, pp. 52–53; 1916, p. 98), Cornelius (1897, pp. 4–10), Höfler (1890, p. 2; 1897, pp. 4–7; 1906, pp. 184–185; 1930, pp. 50–72), Husserl (1900–1901/1993, pp. 1–22), Stumpf (1906a, p. 35; 1906b/1928, p. 55; 1917, p. 4), Pfänder (1900, p. 7; 1920, pp. 162–165), Reinach (1914/1989, p. 533 ff), among others. See also the most quoted passage from Brentano (1895, p. 34): “My school distinguishes between Psychognosie and genetic psychology (on the basis of a remote analogy with geognosy and geology). The task of the former is to exhibit all of the basic mental elements. All other mental phenomena are derived from the combination of these ultimate psychological elements, just as words are built up out of letters.”
As recently suggested (Gallagher/Zahavi 2008, p. 6), it is probably all the more appropriate to pursue this program today as most of the lively debates in the philosophy of mind press us to endorse metaphysical or epistemological options without providing us with a clear description of the phenomena under study.
Within the phenomenological Husserlian tradition, this point has been emphasized in Reinach (1914/1989, p. 373 ff and 385): “Cartesian philosophers fail to see that. In natural attitude, the differences between experiences [are] not given, though experiences are not mixed up. [The] average man is not clear at all about differences, nuances, and the like in inner life. Ask you, for example, how wanting and wishing differs from one another!”
Mental analysis is sometimes compared to chemical analysis. See, e.g., Stumpf (1873, p. 5) and Stout (1896, p. 61). One important difference between mental analysis and chemical analysis, however, is that the former has a descriptive dimension while the later has an explanatory dimension. See Pfänder (1920, p. 163): “Unter Analyse versteht man eben in der Chemie nicht eine Untersuchung über die wirkliche Beschaffenheit der Stoffe, sondern eine Zerstörung der zusammengesetzten Stoffe, um zu erkennen, aus welchen einfachen Stoffen sie unter bestimmten Umständen als etwas Neues entstehen. Das Resultat der chemischen Analyse des Wassers, daß es nämlich aus 2 H und O ‚besteht’, besagt daher nicht, wie beschaffen das Wasser ist. Die psychologische Analyse dagegen will gerade feststellen, wie beschaffen die psychischen Tatsachen sind, wie sie wirklich ‚aussehen’, nicht, wie sie so geworden sind.”
I follow Crane (2001, pp. 74–76) and distinguish the qualitative character that attaches to sensory experiential states from the more controversial notion of qualia, which refers to non-intentional properties of the experience. The basic idea behind this is that the qualitative character of sensory experiences is an explanandum (it is something that any satisfactory theory needs to account for), while the notion of qualia is a much-disputed explanans (it is advocated by some philosophers in order to account for the qualitative character of sensory experiences).
This version is defended in Byrne (2001).
Each of these claims is likely to admit two interpretations depending on whether we understand priority in an ontological or in an epistemological sense. For instance, phenomenal intentionality may be said ontologically prior to non-phenomenal intentionality to the effect that phenomenal intentionality is that in virtue of which intentionality comes into being or is “injected into the world” (to use a phrase from Kriegel 2011, p. 5). On the other hand, phenomenal intentionality may be said epistemologically prior to non-phenomenal intentionality to the effect that phenomenal intentionality is that in virtue of which we come to form the concept of intentionality. This last line of investigation has been developed in Kriegel (2011: Chap. 1).
Tye no longer supports strong representationalism in his 2009.
As far as I know, the first formulation of this historical claim is to be found in Chalmers (2004, p. 153): “In the work of philosophers from Descartes and Locke to Brentano and Husserl, consciousness and intentionality were typically analyzed in a single package.” This formulation, however, is somewhat misleading, for it neglects the fact that intentionality, within the phenomenological tradition, has developed partly against Descartes’ and Locke’s pictures of the mind. Husserl’s methodological internalism has nothing to do with the (descriptively mistaken) claim that the mind always refers to its own “ideas” or “presentations.”
See Brentano (1874/2008, p. 218/174 [1995, p. 154]): “Consciousness of this secondary object is threefold: It involves a presentation of it, a cognition of it and a feeling toward it.” It is plain that these modes must be conceived as the integral parts of the act of self-perception.
See Brentano (1874/2008, p. 230/181 [1995, p. 162]): “When we are dealing with parts which belong to one and the same reality, we can conceive them to be connected with one another in many ways and with greater or lesser intimacy.”
He introduces the concept of “distinctional part” along the following lines (1890–1891/1982, p. 13 [2002, p. 16]): “Someone who believes in atoms believes in corpuscles which cannot be dissolved into smaller bodies. But even so he can speak of halfs, quarters, etc. of atoms: parts which are distinguishable even though they are not actually separable. To differentiate these from others, we may refer to them as distinctional [distinktionelle] parts. And, since distinguishing goes beyond actual separability, one could speak of parts or elements of elements.” Among distinctional parts within the field of mental analysis, he further distinguishes between distinction proper and modifying distinction, and within the first group, between “mutually pervading” parts (e.g., affirmative quality and directionality of a judgement), “logical” parts (e.g., presenting and feeling, feeling and visual feeling), parts of the intentional correlation, and parts of the inner perception (or, as he calls them, parts of the “mental diplopia”).
Like Crane (2001), I contend that our mental states are individuated by intentional mode as well. Any intentional mode, on the proposed view, is another “distinctional” part of the relevant mental state.
I add the qualification “proper” in order to avoid the interpretation according to which the part could be identical to the whole (this would bring us back to the identity theory of phenomenal intentionality; see “Inseparatism and the demand for unity”).
In my view, the qualitative character <blue> is a nonconceptual part of the content or, say, a nonconceptual partial content Rp, which is likely to enter into combination with conceptual elements. Representational content, thus, is an articulated content involving both conceptual and nonconceptual parts. I have argued for this kind of approach in Dewalque (2011).
Compare with what Tye (2003, p. 31) says about the unity of the “multi-modal” experience that is enjoyed by the wine taster.
One way of challenging the proposed view is to claim that analyzed phenomenon and unanalyzed phenomenon are very different things or that analyzing is modifying. Therefore, mental analysis would not provide us with a description of the original phenomenon. What is described would always be a modified phenomenon. This objection has been disputed by Brentano’s followers (e.g., Meinong 1894; Stout 1896). One crucial aspect of the notion of mental analysis lies in the fact that analysis is not supposed to create anything. Rather, it aims at finding out or at making explicit some preexistent parts that already lie (implicitly) in the unanalyzed phenomenon. Still, mental analysis is always open to introspective verification. As Stout remarks, it is not necessary that the analyzed phenomenon is identical to the unanalyzed one. Suffice it to admit that the analyzed phenomenon corresponds to the unanalyzed one. “In this way,” Stout concludes (1896, p. 61), “it is possible that we may come to know the original experience by the very same process which transforms and modifies it.”
Accordingly, we should take literally the claim that “intentional content appears to be part and parcel of phenomenology” (Chalmers 2004, p. 179).
Compare with Brentano (1890–1891/1982, pp. 16–17 [1995, p. 19]): “If we have two spots before us which agree in lightness, in quality and maybe in other parts, and which differ only spatially [spatiality being taken here as an abstractive, distinctional part of the spots; AD], then they will appear as two, regardless of the manifold agreement. And, in fact, we do not only talk of two spatial determinations, but also of two individually different qualities [and] of two individually different lightnesses […]. An equal lightness precisely does not mean that it is individually and actually the same.” Just like changing one abstractive part of a colored spot amounts to changing the spot itself, changing one abstractive part of a mental state (e.g., its content or its mode) amounts to changing the state itself, and hence this amounts to changing “what it is like” to undergo that very state (see Horgan and Tienson 2002, p. 522).
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Acknowledgments
Earlier drafts of this paper have been presented at the Husserl Archives in Paris (March 29, 2012), at the 6th annual Seminar of the Research Group “Phénoménologies” at the University of Liège (April 23–27, 2012), and at the Université Libre de Bruxelles (October 31, 2012). I am grateful to Uriah Kriegel for his help in the revision of the text and his valuable comments.
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Dewalque, A. Brentano and the parts of the mental: a mereological approach to phenomenal intentionality. Phenom Cogn Sci 12, 447–464 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-012-9293-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-012-9293-8