Abstract
This paper is about the question: what is it for a mental state to mean (or present) something as an intentional object? This issue is addressed from a broad perspective, against the background of Brentano’s philosophical program in Psychology from an empirical standpoint, and the controversy between the proponents of a non-canonical interpretation of Brentano’s theory of intentionality, and the so-called orthodox interpretation advocated namely by R. Chisholm. My investigation is divided into six parts. In the first section, I explain the meaning and function of the notion of phenomenon in light of Brentano’s philosophical program, and I briefly elucidate the notion of physical phenomenon which, in Brentano’s Psychology, constitutes the primary object of consciousness. In the next two sections, I look at two aspects of Brentano’s criticism of the identity thesis that he attributes to British empiricism, namely the psychological aspect, which concerns the identification of the two classes of phenomena, and the metaphysical aspect relating to the relationship between physical phenomena and the reality of an extramental world. Once this double distinction will be established, I will turn to the relation of intentional objects to presentations and put forward the hypothesis that intentional objects are conceptually dependent upon presentations and that this dependence rests, in turn, upon the content of the mental phenomena. The next step concerns Brentano’s theory of primary and secondary objects, and one of the main non-orthodox arguments against the canonical interpretation, namely that the latter conflates primary and secondary objects. In this context, I examine a second hypothesis: that the secondary object, or intentional correlate of an act, is an intentional content, which is distinct both from the intentional object and from the reality to which it relates, and I maintain that the intentional content has the function of mediating the mental acts’ relation to their objects. Finally, I shall examine some objections against the hypothesis of intentional content in Brentano’s Psychology, and I will conclude with a brief commentary on the bearing of this investigation with regard to the interpretation of the genesis of Brentano’s theory of intentionality, before and after the “reistic” turn of his philosophy.
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Notes
- 1.
Hereinafter referred to as Psychology. My thanks to Guillaume Fréchette and Hanid Taieb for their helpful comments on an earlier drafts of this paper.
- 2.
Compare with the wording of the first sentence of the 1911 appendix to Psychology in which Brentano summarizes the results achieved in this work: “What is characteristic of every mental activity is, as I believe I have shown, the reference to something as an object. In this respect, every mental activity seems to be something relational” (1995a, p. 211).
- 3.
Chisholm’s thesis is clearly stated in the following excerpt: “According to the doctrine of intentional inexistence, the object of the thought about a unicorn is a unicorn, but a unicorn with a mode of being (intentional inexistence, immanent objectivity, or existence in the understanding) that is short of actuality but more than nothingness and that, according to most versions of the doctrine, lasts for just the length of time that the unicorn is thought about” (Chisholm, 1972, p. 705).
- 4.
- 5.
This discussion was resumed a few years later in his lectures Zeitbewegende philosophische Fragen which he held in Vienna one year before he left Austria and in which he extensively discusses several versions of phenomenalism. Zeitbewegende philosophische Fragen, (1893–1894), Houghton Library: Harvard, LS 20, p. 29366–29,475, hereinafter referred to as Lectures on positivism.
- 6.
Brentano distinguishes between physical phenomenon and sensation by arguing that, unlike the physical phenomena of external perception, which have their origin in the physical stimulation of our sense organs, the domain of sensations includes all the images that appear in one’s imagination, which are not, strictly speaking, physical phenomena because they are not objects of external perception and only come into play as “contents of mental phenomena” (Brentano, 2008, p. 117).
- 7.
I say a similar mistake because, in the case of Brentano’s criticism of Bain and Hamilton, which I will examine in this section and the next, the mistake rests on the identification of the two classes of phenomena, i.e., from what is felt to the act of feeling which accompanies it, while the heterodox argument rests on the amalgamation of the intentional object and the content of the act which they conceive of as its correlate as we shall see below. However, insofar as they identify the physical phenomenon with the concomitant feeling and consider sense feeling as a mental phenomenon, this identification amounts to conceiving of the perception of pain as an inner perception which is therefore, from Brentano’s point of view, evident and indubitable (1995a, p. 65). In other words, this amounts to saying that they identify the primary object of external perception, what is felt, with the secondary object of internal perception, i.e., the feeling’s content. That is why Brentano’s proposal to replace the identity relation with that of correlation is plausible as we shall see below.
- 8.
„Nur eine Annahme scheint, wenn es kein unbewusstes Bewusstsein geben soll, der Folgerung einer unendlichen Verwickelung entgehen zu können; diejenige nämlich, welche Hören und Gehörtes für ein und dasselbe Phänomen erklärt, indem sie das Hören auf sich selbst als sein Objekt gerichtet denkt. Ton und Hören wären dann entweder nur zwei Namen für ein und dasselbe Phänomen, oder der Unterschied ihrer Bedeutung bestände etwa darin, dass man mit dem Namen Ton die äußere Ursache bezeichnete, die man früher gemeiniglich dem Phänomen im Hörenden ähnlich dachte, und von der man darum sagte, dass sie im Hören erscheine, während sie in Wahrheit unserer Vorstellung sich entzieht“(Brentano, 2008, p. 140–141).
- 9.
„Im vorigen Kapitel besprachen wir eine Stelle von A. Bain, worin dieser Philosoph die Gefühlsempfindung im Sinne des Empfindens und des Empfundenen völlig identifiziert und für alle übrigen Gattungen von Sinneseindrücken dasselbe Verhältnis der Identität zwischen Act und Objekt des Aktes andeutet“ (Brentano, 2008, p. 141).
- 10.
“The relation is that between subject and object. And this certainly has to do with what others like Mach (and Lotze, for example) explained by saying that it is clear from the outset that there can be no color without an act of seeing (Sehen). But they finally say nothing about space, magnitude, Gestalt and movement. However, let us consider that we also have a presentation of these items as we have a presentation of colors and sounds (. . .) through sensation; then it seems that, to be consistent, one must also maintain, in the same way, that magnitudes, gestalt, movement, in short, all that is spatial, would never be able to exist (bestehen) if not as correlates of sensations and to entertain a subject-object relation with the latter. The opposite would be absurd. And we will have something essentially similar to what Mach wanted [with his doctrine of elements]” (LS 20, p. 29,444–29,445). The notion of correlation is used in this quotation in a broad sense, in order to characterize the relationship between the physical phenomenon and the vision of colour. Brentano argues that one presents space — which is a characteristic feature of color — by means of sensation. Under these conditions, everything that appears to us as extended can only exist in an intentional relation from the perceiving subject to its object, and in this case color, and as a correlate of sensation in the sense that since space is a property of colour, any representation of colour necessarily refers to something that appears to us as extended.
- 11.
Notice, however, that Bain’s position on that issue is here again a particular case of a more general position that Brentano attributes to several philosophers, including Hamilton, who claims that the lack of absolute knowledge, which stems from the thesis of the relativity of knowledge, has as a metaphysical consequence the relativity of the reality of an external world to the subject of knowledge (Hamilton, 1859, p. 96–97). Basically, the term phenomenon is associated in Hamilton with that of “relative,” which is opposed to absolute, in the sense that nothing exists absolutely, i.e., “in and for itself, and without relation to us and our faculties” (1859, p. 97). In his Lectures on positivism, Brentano attributes a similar position to A. Comte, St. Mill and Mach. For example, he claims that Mach’s phenomenalism and his proof of the absurdity of a spatial external world are grounded on the identity of the mental and the physical in sensation. Here again, Brentano’s refutation of Mach’s phenomenalism is based on his criticism of Mach’s identity thesis. He addresses the same reproach to Mill’s doctrine of the permanent possibility of sensation, and he maintains that St. Mill can be considered a positivist just like Mach insofar as he rules out everything that is not psychical, i.e., that “the object of experience is only his own mental phenomena. And so, he believes that he may not assume anything real other than his own psychical phenomena. (…) Indeed, only our own mental phenomena deserve the name of facts of experience (LS 20, p. 29411). Brentano maintains that metaphysical phenomenalism inevitably leads to a form of idealism, which can be summarized by Berkeley’s classical formula: esse est percipii.
- 12.
Brentano explains in his 1908 research manuscript on ontology that “the same thing can be an object in several ways, and several thinking activities can be directed towards the same object. The latter <occurs> whenever someone thinks of something and desires it, for instance; the former, however, when a thing that is presented by us can be presented now more determinately, now less determinately and, if less so, then less determinately now in one way, now in another way. I can present a certain red point with determinate localization and color. Being red and here belongs to it; if the first of these or the second were missing, it would not be this red point; but it can happen that, by thinking the concept of a red point in general, or the concept of something here in general, I think of that which is the red point, hence the red point indeterminately” (Brentano, 2020, § 31).
- 13.
Let us recall that for Brentano, the presentational mode by itself does not yet constitute a proper perception, i.e., a Wahrnehmung (literally: what is taken as true), for it presupposes a belief or a judgment. Hence Brentano’s thesis that perception is a judgment.
- 14.
Brentano attaches great importance to the thesis that every mental state is conscious, a thesis he opposes in Psychology to the hypothesis of unconscious mental states (1995a, p. 78). Every mental phenomenon is conscious or, as Brentano also says, this class of phenomena is always accompanied by a concomitant consciousness.
- 15.
Brentano explains in his Lectures on positivism that „Grünsehen ist nicht = grün, sondern geht auf das Grün als sein immanentes Objekt. Das eine besteht sicher in Wirklichkeit; von dem anderen gilt es jetzt als ausgemacht, daß nicht“(LS 20, p. 29438).
- 16.
Another major change that Brentano’s psychology underwent in his lectures on descriptive psychology concerns his conception of the subject as a substance, a conception that Brentano had explicitly dismissed in 1874 in his discussion of the Aristotelian definition of psychology as a science of the soul to which he opposes his own definition as a science of mental phenomena (1995a, p. 2 f.). In contrast, in the Lectures on descriptive psychology, the subject is conceived of as a substance. On the changes in Brentano’s definition of psychology as a “science of the soul,” (see 1995b, p. 155); regarding his definition of the mental as a substance, Brentano writes: “Everything psychical which we apperceive is composed. It is an accident which includes the substance of the soul, or a plurality of accidents of the same substance, each of which contains this substance. Each phenomenon of the soul has several correlates, a primary object and a secondary one, the latter being the phenomenon itself, given as an object”. (Brentano 1995b, p. 167–168)
- 17.
„…Teilphänomene eines einheitlichen Phänomens, in dem sie enthalten sind, und für ein einziges einheitliches Ding “(Brentano, 2008, p. 114).
- 18.
I am not the first to revisit Brentano’s thesis along these lines. G. Fréchette (2013) also used the notion of content in order to elucidate the notion of intentional correlate in Brentano. He conceives of the correlation in terms of the dependence of the presentation on its content and suggests using the distinction between the content of an act and its content in order to account for the more exotic distinction between correlatum and relatum. Thus, the non-real correlate becomes quite simply the “content” of a mental state while the immanent object becomes the “intentional object” of the act: “For every act of presentation p, there is a content cp such that not only p and cp are interdependent, but also that being aware of p also means to be aware of cp, and the other way round as well. Presenting a horse or a unicorn does not make an ontological difference in that respect, since the correlation holds between the act and its correlate: the presented-horse or the presented-unicorn (Fréchette, 2013, p. 100). However, Fréchette only considers cases of objectless presentation and does not seem to have considered the possibility of assigning intentional contents the function of mediator between an act and its object. See also A. Chrudzimski (2013).
- 19.
This is confirmed in Brentano’s Psychology wherein he identifies his position with that of Aristotle in Metaphysics: “Thus in the twelfth book of the Metaphysics, he says, ‘Knowledge, sensation, opinion and reflection seem always to relate to something else, but only incidentally to themselves.’ Here it is apparent that his conception agrees entirely with our own and he undoubtedly had this conception in mind when he wrote the above quoted passage in which he rejected the infinite complication of mental activity as an unjustified inference” (Psychology, p. 102).
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Fisette, D. (2022). Brentano on Presenting Something as an Intentional Object. In: Mariani Zini, F. (eds) The Meaning of Something. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09610-5_1
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